Alexandre de Riquer - The Anglo

Transcription

Alexandre de Riquer
ALEXANDRE DE RIQUER
(1856 - 1920)
The British Connection in
Catalan Modernisme
By
Eliseu Trenc Ballester
&
Alan Yates
1988
THE ANGLO-CATALAN SOCIETY
THE ANGLO-CATALAN SOCIETY
OCCASIONAL PUBLICATIONS
No. 1. Salvador Giner. The Social Structure of Catalonia
(1980, reprinted 1984)
No. 2. Joan Salvat-Papasseit. Selected Poems (1982)
No. 3. David Mackay. Modern Architecture in Barcelona (1985)
No. 4. Homage to Joan Gili (1987)
No. 5. E. Trenc Ballester & Alan Yates. Alexandre de Riquer (1988)
©
E. Trenc Ballester & Alan Yates
Produced and typeset by Sheffield Academic Press Ltd
Printed by A. Wheaton & Co. Ltd, Exeter
Cover design by Joan Gili
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Ballester, Eliseu Trenc
Alexandre de Riquer (1856-1920): the
British connection in Catalan modernisme.
(The Anglo-Catalan Society occasional
publications, ISSN 0144-5863; 5).
1. Catalan decorative arts. Riquer,
Alexandre de, 1856-1920
I. Title II. Yates, Alan III. Series
745'.092'4
ISBN 0-905713-74-0
PREFACE
The origins of the present publication were in an article by Eliseu
Trenc Ballester, 'Alexandre de
Riquer, ambassadeur de l'art
anglais et nord-américain en
Catalogne', which appeared in
Volume XVIII (1982) of the
Melanges de la Casa Velazquez, pp. 311-359. It was a documentary
study of the important influence that certain tendencies in British art
and artistic ideas of the nineteenth century exercised in the crucial
and productive phase of cultural development in Catalonia over the
turn of the century, the phenomenon known as Catalan Modernisme.
What the article highlighted was the role of Alexandre de Riquer in
this process. The nature and interest of the subject commended
themselves naturally to the editorial committee of the Anglo-Catalan
Society's Occasional Publications, at a time when the collection was
in its infancy and when its objectives and range were just being
clearly defined.
E.T., for some time a participator in the Society's affairs, agreed to
the proposal that his original piece be expanded and modified to the
characteristics of the ACSOP series. This involved building around
the original research article a set of chapters to place Alexandre de
Riquer's life and work in their cultural context, to supply a relatively
detailed biography and to give an account of his literary production.
The latter was felt to require a sizeable proportion of space, because
of the access which his writing supplies to certain key traits of the
important creative movement in which he was involved.
The original project thus grew in scope and in size. There was,
from the start, a collaborative aspect to the operation, insofar as
E.T.'s original text and then drafts of other chapters were being
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Alexandre de Riquer
translated from the French by various members of the AngloCatalan Society. A.Y.'s role in this increased as the work took on
definitive shape, and the point was reached where joint authorship
was felt to reflect input to and responsibility for the product. Some
signs of a division of labour are to be seen in the text published here,
but this monograph is offered by its authors as the result of a
common effort: the finished version was hammered out in a series of
joint work-sessions held in Sheffield, Paris and Toulouse. Both the
subject, then, and the circumstances in which this little book was
produced are fully consonant with the stated objectives of the
ACSOP collection and, more widely, with the collective spirit of the
Anglo-Catalan Society.
The present tide appears at a time when international appreciation
of the singular character and quality of modern Catalan culture is
markedly, and gratifyingly, on the increase. The currently fashionable
image of the city of Barcelona itself has contributed to awareness of
how crucial and how productive in the consolidation of the modern
Catalan cultural identity were the decades spanning the turn of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The fin-de-siècle recovery of a
splendid gothic inheritance is written in the streets and buildings of
the capital. Our present historical awareness of the making of
contemporary Catalonia focuses naturally upon the turn of the
century and upon the phenomenon of Modernisme which brought to
a head nineteenth-century processes of national revival. The life and
work of Alexandre de Riquer are here studied as representative of
central features of this complex and fertile phase of cultural
evolution. The 'British connection' in our subject is one such feature
which we here endeavour to show in true perspective and in relation to
the underlying dynamics—with its achievements and its frustrations—
of Modernisme. In a basically biographical approach, the broad lines
emerge portraying a man of the nineteenth century whose vision of a
new era was crossed with contradictions of an inherited past and was
severely stressed by the incipient crises of the twentieth century. His
words and his images remain, though, as monuments to the vision
that is now being positively revalued as our own century draws to a
close.
Preface
The work of Riquer, in the recent renewal of interest of Catalan
Modernisme, has been the subject of scholarly critical and historical
attention. The English connection was disclosed and investigated in
M. McCarthy's unpublished doctoral dissertation (Catalan 'Modernisme'
and English Cultural Movements of the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge
1973). M.A. Cerdà i Surroca pays him generous attention in her Els
Pre-rafaelites a Catalunya. Una literatura i uns símbols (Barcelona
1981). She and E.T. were principal contributors to the commemorative
volume of studies (Alexandre de Riquer. L'home, l'artista, el poeta)
published in Calaf (1978), while E.T. supplied text for the catalogue
published on the occasion of a major exhibition of Riquer's work
(Barcelona 1985). Specialised studies of both the art (notably Cirici,
Ràfols, Fontbona) and the literature of Modernisme (Castellanos)
accord due attention to Riquer. The foregoing, however, tend
understandably to see his work as belonging to either the field of the
visual arts or, to a lesser extent, to that of literature. The present
publication is the first attempt to present a unified view of his life and
work, in which both the literary and the visual aspects are viewed as
complementary, within a biographical frame. For reasons already
expressed, it is fitting that this should be published in English, and in
the uniform of the ACSOP series. While the following pages direct a
steady spotlight upon Catalan Modernisme, they include also a
sidelight upon the pervasive influence of contemporary British art
movements.
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Alexandre de Riquer
We wish to record here our gratitude to Dominic Keown, Susi
Serrarols and John Devlin, for their cooperation in the early stages of
preparing the text; to Pauline Climpson and her colleagues at
Sheffield Academic Press, for the patience, good taste and professionalism which they have devoted to steering this publication through
all the processes of production. Grateful acknowledgement is also
made of continuing financial support for the ACSOP series from the
Instituto de España in London, and of a generous grant for the
present title from the Fundació Congrés de Cultura Catalana.
E.T.
A.Y.
Sheffield
17/vi/1988
CHAPTER I
CATALAN MODERNISME (1888-1911)
The term Modernisme has very
particular and extensive connotations for the development of
society and culture in modern
Catalonia. It refers to a twofold process occurring in the
Principality (and secondarily in Valencia and the Balearic Islands)
during the two crucial decades spanning the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Within a continuing surge of social transformation
there emerged together impulses for the explicit modernisation of a
culture considered archaic, pedestrian and provincial—Catalan
culture as it had taken shape during the nineteenth-century revival
movement of the Renaixença—and for the creation of a specifically
national art. Both motives were intertwined, and related to a
complex social ferment. Associated with the growth of political
Catalanism, awareness increased that only by becoming cosmopolitan
and abreast of the latest advances abroad would Catalan culture
shake off its provincial complexion, thus to attain a higher degree of
differentiation and independence from perceived deficiencies in the
official Spanish-Castilian culture centred in Madrid. Most of the
key-notes are sounded, and the external colouring revealed, in this
altogether typical passage from an article by Juan Gay on the
composer D'Indy, published in the journal Luz for November
1898:
... Let us have the Strausses, the D'Indys, the Chaussons, the
Debussys in music; let us have all modern literary works of
whatever tendencies; let us have affiches and sentimental moodpaintings, and let all of us together put movement into art, so that
it is seen to be alive, it being of no matter that they dub us
modernistes or whatever, as long as our actions signify advancement
for our Catalonia. If we are mistaken in our tendencies, we shall
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Alexandre de Riquer
have lost nothing: we shall have gone through an artistic revolution
[our emphasis], which will eventually establish the true way,
towards which we shall direct our steps. What is called for now is
much artistic agitation, to allow us to begin to escape from the
materialism which engulfs us, by giving as idealised a cast as
possible to our existence.
As is clearly expressed here, the opening up of Catalonia to
contemporary European culture was essential to a project of
collective affirmation and renovation. What this is fin-de-siècle
Europe offered was an apparently stable political model of bourgeois
nationhood, and a beguiling array of artistic options related to
profound changes in taste, sensibility and fashion. One thus
understands why eclecticism was the watchword of Catalan
Modernisme: the outwards scan validated the complementary
inwards gaze, the urgent enquiry about selfhood, personal and
collective. A notion of 'cultural revolution', strongly imprinted in
Gay's message, expresses the close relationship between the artistic
and the social dimensions of the whole cycle.
A first stage in this process was the partial assimilation of
Naturalism in literature and the plastic arts, mainly by the critics J.
Sardà and J. Yxart, the novelist Narcís Oller and the painters
Santiago Rusinol and Ramon Casas, during the decade 1883-1893.
This was the period in which the impressive journal L'Avenç
operated as a rallying-point and catalyst of progressive intellectual
currents applied to the particular circumstances of Catalan culture.
In the early phase of Modernisme, the scientific and positivistic
connotations of Naturalism, even without its more radical philosophical
and social import, offered a provocative challenge to stale conventionalism and predominantly romantic conservatism. The strongest
impetus of the movement, however, was generated under a different
aesthetic sign, in a development dating from the crucial year of 1893.
It was from this point that Modernisme moved on from having a
fairly wide and general sense of cultural renovation, as formulated in
L'Avenç, to acquire a more specific definition and programme. There
emerged a concerted, assertive literary and artistic movement, led by
the multi-talented Rusinol and the critic-author Raimon Casellas,
which, although short-lived as a coherently concentrated force,
redefined the terms of creativity and of its social relevance. Again as
can be detected in the passage quoted above, this entailed a radical
critique of contemporary Catalan society, charged with philistinism
Catalan Modernisme (1888-1911)
13
and 'soul-lessness', and attributed to Art and to the artist-intellectual
a messianic function.
The sign under which this enterprise was conceived was a direct
derivation of Symbolism, whose full reverberations came to overlay
Naturalism and eventually to occupy the foreground of the Catalan
cultural scene between 1893 and 1898. The British Pre-Raphaelites,
Franco-Belgian Symbolism, German and Nordic idealism, all left
deep impressions in every creative sphere during this period. The
most familiar reminiscences are those of Maeterlinck, Ibsen, Wagner,
Schopenhauer Nietzsche, Ruskin, Puvis de Chavannes, Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Böcklin, in fact the full pleiade of
the fin-de-siècle, avidly and in many cases originally adopted to the
Catalan circumstances and translated into its idiom. Enhancement
of the value of the artistic product went hand in hand with a real
education of sensibility, of the kind that Catalan culture needed to
undergo if the ambition of standing on equal terms with its European
counterparts was to be fulfilled.
The general evolution is reflected in numerous individual cases,
where the common denominator is priority given to aesthetic
emotion over 'analysis', to suggestion over statement. Intuition and
artistic perception become the favoured modes of access to a
transcendent 'reality', producing the characteristic symbiosis of
diverse forms and genres as these all
aspire, in Pater's words, to the condition of music. Casellas defended the
new aesthetics in relation principally
to the visual arts, while translating
theory into practice in narrative
prose which evolved from the early
imitation of Pre-Raphaelite devices
towards a highly stylised realism.
Santiago Rusiñol, as painter, author
and cultural activist, assumed visible
leadership in the 1890s. The focus of
modernista energies and publicity
were the Modernist Festivals which
he set up in Sitges as a concerted
attempt to enliven the cultural scene
and promote total Art in Catalonia.
Particularly important were the second
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Alexandre de Riquer
one in 1893 which included the epoch-making performance of
Maeterlinck's L'Intruse, and the fourth in 1897 with the production
of La fada by Massó i Torrents and the composer Enric Morera, an
exercise in Wagnerian total drama conceived to establish a Catalan
national opera. In his own painting Rusiñol moved swiftly from his
early naturalistic idiom, to a subjective, introspective style in which
interest lay fully in the capturing of mood and atmosphere. This
trajectory was paralleled in the appearance of his most characteristically symbolist creation in literature, the prose-poems Oracions
(1897).
The influence of several currents related to symbolist aesthetics
(and philosophy) spread quickly. From as early as 1894 Alexandre de
Riquer introduced and practised a
version of Art Nouveau that was
directly related to British sources,
especially the spirit of William
Morris and Burne-Jones and its
impression on all the graphic and
decorative arts. This is the particular
chapter of the total history of
Modernisme that constitutes the
focus of the present monograph. It
is important to be aware all the
time, though, that our subject
stands within a positive surge of
talents, all showing diversified
approximation to the new aesthetics:
Adrià Gual and Apel·les Mestres,
Miquel Utrillo, Lluís Bonnín,
Joaquim Vancells, Josep M.
Tamburini, Joan Brull, Josep M.
Roviralta, Sebastià Junyent, etc...
The journal Luz, the most refined
publication of Catalan Modernisme
(despite the paradox of its predominant use of Castilian), was
launched in 1898 and marked the
apogee of Symbolism's diffusion
as innovatory fashion, with contributions from most of the artists
15
just mentioned. However, at the end of that same year of 1898,
Spain's defeat in the Cuban War brought to a head a crisis whose
effect was to create in the artistic fraternity a reaction of disenchantment
with the fashionable morbidity of Decadence and with symbolist
escapism. A sort of counter-current is perceptible in aspects of the
work of a group of slightly younger painters including Isidre Nonell,
Mir, Canals, Pidelaserra and the young Picasso... Prominent here is
a component of social protest given in an expressionist style whose
emphasis was on the sordid, a discernible qualification of symbolist
flights into aestheticism. It was with this brilliant group that the
epoch of Modernisme in the visual arts came to a close with the first
decade of the new century. Thereafter what survived were the mere
externals of a style that had become conventional mannerism, or a
medium without a message.
In literature the situation was more complex. The symbolist and
naturalist currents ran side by side, frequently interacting, but
circumscribed in many areas by the effects of an interrupted literary
tradition, by the relative underdevelopment of the market and by the
limitations of a still 'unreformed' literary language. Allowing for this
natural 'drag', though, Modernisme generated its characteristic, and
characteristically exuberant, equivalences in literature.
The Naturalism-Symbolism alternative is particularly visible in
the theatre where, side by side, under the same sign of artistic
innovation, there appeared the work of Adrià Gual, a disciple of
Maeterlinck, and that of Ignasi Iglesias and J. Puig i Ferreter, two
exponents of a socially orientated theatre strongly influenced by
Ibsen and Hauptmann. Art for Art's sake or an Art designed to
fathom the Unknowable thus contended with the regenerationist
(and in this case populist) tendency.
In other genres die play of forces was less sharply delineated. In
poetry there are writers like Miquel de Palol or Alexandre de Riquer
whose initial orientation was clearly symbolist, while Jeroni Zanné
introduced specifically Parnassian designs to a panorama in which
lyricism of the most subjective or even Decadent kind was the passepartout. After 1898, however, and with the ensuing concentration of
catalanista values, the major figure of Joan Maragall came to
dominate the scene with a distinctive voice, an authentic fusion of
personal and collective concerns, and a poetic theory exalting la
Paraula Viva—the living word, utmost sincerity of feeling and
expression—, that exerted a considerable moral influence upon his
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Alexandre de Riquer
contemporaries. If D'Annunzio provided a foreign model of vitalism
that suited the new atmosphere, it was Maragall who, as embodiment
of local essences, sounded the whole current of European romanticism
going back through Heine to Goethe and Novalis, consummating
diverse possibilities within the modernista repertoire.
The panorama of modernista prose is likewise variegated, not least
because of the break-down of the traditional generic categories under
the influence of Symbolism. Material and contextual factors, as well
as aesthetic ones, affected this situation. The so-called crisis of the
nineteenth-century novel was felt more acutely in Catalonia than in
other European literatures, for reasons alluded to above. Modernisme
nonetheless generated a spate of very diversified productivity in
prose (and some notable novelistic specimens) in which the prevalent
subjective idealism was associated with the urge to create narrative
forms—running over into poetic or pictorial styles—appropriate to
the new epoch. There is, then, no contradiction in the coexistence of
the most refined, ethereal mood-painting and an almost sadistic new
brutalism, for example, or of prose-poetry and popular satire. On the
other hand, a distinct surge of interest in rural themes and settings
can be related to the contemporary growth of nationalism and its
quest for the roots of the community. The situation is well
represented in the prose contents of the major journal Joventut
(1900-1906), in which one finds side by side the extremes of a
primitivist ruralism (where Maragall's influence is distinct) and of a
17
current of refined urbanity shot through with culturalist references.
The latter, in fact, prefigured the manner that the ensuing movement
of Noucentisme would promote and cultivate in the service of a
conservative nationalism which renounced its modernista precedents.
Within the turbulence of ideas and possibilities for narrative prose,
and against the background of a considerable boom in production,
two works stand out as the joint summa of modernista preoccupations
and designs expressed in novel form: Els sots feréstecs (1901) by
Raimon Casellas, and Solitud (1905) by Víctor Català (pseudonym of
Caterina Albert). In each case a powerful narrative line and a highly
stylised mountain setting are 'pretexts' for exploring the limits of
human consciousness in relation to both the aesthetic and philosophical
concepts of Modernisme. Together they represent, perhaps, the most
complete expression of the modernista sensibility, particularly in that
they turn it back imaginatively upon the constraints set upon its own
enterprise.
In the sphere of architecture and the decorative arts, Modernisme
has tended to be confused with Art Nouveau, further adding to the
terminological vagueness from which the phenomenon has suffered.
After 1900 the most authentic exponents in the decorative arts
rejected the label of modernistes, although that is obviously what they
are for us, and the term was relegated to refer only to the decorative
Art Nouveau (on its way to being the facile mannerism mentioned
above) adopted by a fashion-conscious bourgeoisie. Our present-day
perspective allows us to discern that alongside this Art Nouveau
wave—predominant, it is true—there flourished various other
distinctive aesthetic tendencies, in particular a strong neo-Gothic
strain and a synthetic realism, inspired by Toulouse-Lautrec and
Steinlen, whose outstanding exponent was the painter Ramon Casas.
It remains true, though, that in the areas of furniture, glass, ceramics,
silverwork and, above all, architecture, Modernisme was a specifically
Catalan reinterpretation of Art Nouveau or Modern Style. It is
sufficient to consider the principal buildings of Gaudí, Puig i
Cadafalch and Domènech i Montaner to appreciate the force and
originality of this Catalan adaptation at the same time as the
diversity of expression arising from a single, common inspiration.
(David Mackay's contribution to the present series, Modern
Architecture in Barcelona, provides illuminating discussion of this
subject.) Ultimately it is etymology which explains the primary
energy of Modernisme in relation to its counterparts abroad: a
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Alexandre de Riquer
question of creating, within the exhilaration of the Catalan context, a
new art, a modern art seen as appropriate to the dawning of a new
era, and to a reaffirmation of Catalan-ness.
Within the stylistic diversity of Modernisme, then, one can
perceive a fundamental unity of another order. At bottom, the
constant shifts and changes, the quest for novelty alongside the urge
to rediscover authentic Catalan roots, were all the expression of the
crisis of an age. It was a sense of crisis (taken in itself to be a token of
modernity) which was felt to mark the break between the moribund
values of the nineteenth century and the nascent civilisation of the
twentieth, one which was mysterious and exciting because still
poorly defined. This society, afflicted by social tensions (the class
struggle and anarchism), political crisis and the traumas of dynamic
change (the Catalonia-Spain friction, especially after 1898) and
economic difficulties (the loss of colonial markets), produced a
culture which was riven by a deep tension: between Decadentism
(morbidity, listlessness, the oneiric cult of memory and tradition)
and Vitalism (a hymn to life and youth, a projection towards an
idealised new society). The real society of fin-de-siècle Catalonia
harboured its own erotico-mystical phantoms: its perverse or saintly
women, images of purity or corruption and apocalypse, its talismanic
flora and its sinuous lines which suggested mystical communication
with the Unknowable. Behind these swirling projections of the
emancipated imagination there moved what the modernistes themselves
understood as a 'feverish metaphysical quest'. In religion, the same
quest could lead, at one extreme, into religious esoterism, or, at the
other, back into the most strictly orthodox Catholicism; in politics it
could lead either to anarchism or to the most idealised historicism. In
many case, too, the extremes could overlap.
There is another apparent contradiction that requires brief
comment here. On the one hand, modernista art stood in frank
opposition to the cultural impact of industrialisation, John Ruskin's
influence being decisive in this respect, but it sought on the other
hand to reconcile the Applied and the Fine Arts through exploitation
of new means of production. The modernistes were not, then, trapped
in an insoluble conflict between Art and Life. Certainly, for many of
them, the reaction against indifference and 'soul-lessness' in a
materialistic middle class opened on to aestheticism and the flight
from reality. But these same artists, particularly those who expressed
themselves in the decorative arts and in architecture, saw in their
19
activity a way of transforming and embellishing reality through their
creations. The ideal, which the writers and musicians seconded, was
an organic human environment fashioned to a new sophistication of
taste and according to challengingly new concepts of beauty.
The renewed intensity of cultural activity in Catalonia was
experienced not only in the capital Barcelona but in simultaneous
waves which affected the main provincial centres: Girona, Reus,
Terrassa, Sitges, etc. and, further afield, Lleida, Valencia, Majorca...
The decorative flourish, the exuberance of Modernisme translated
the immediate vitality and confidence of an economically dynamic
society, open to innovation and disposed to affirmation of a
distinctive communal identity. Modernisme was the cultural galvanisation of this potential, at least for as long as its own ideals remained
valid.
The heyday of Modernisme contained already the forces which
would bring about its crisis and demise. Its extreme idealism was
ultimately to prove unsusceptible to political channelling, and the
movement of Noucentisme swiftly invoked the virtues of order,
restraint and responsibility in the service of a nationalism whose
conservative cast became clearer as its political achievements gained
consistency. A new and most productive phase of cultural Catalanism
took shape with the opening of the new century, taking over and
monopolising the basic aims of Modernisme, appropriating some of
its means and forms of expression while violently repudiating others.
The legacy of Noucentisme—particularly in its cultural institutions
and in its stabilising influence upon the natural 'social institution' of
the language—has been fundamental in characterising Catalan
culture in the twentieth century. For our purposes, though, it is
important to focus on the two movements at their point of
interaction and to appreciate how Noucentisme arose from within the
modernista project itself.
The new orthodoxy invoked discipline, 'classical' simplicity and
rigorous propriety. Mediterranean limpidity dispelled Nordic mists.
The price for the intellectual-artist's admission to the new order was
acceptance of a 'party line' (that of Enric Prat de la Riba's Lliga
Regionalista') and subordination of the previously exalted artistic
freedom, seen now as dissolvent and conducive to Chaos. The
consequence of this was the isolation and disorientation of many
committed modernistes who would not or could not conform. The
picture is, of course, far more complex than this drastic summary
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Alexandre de Riquer
suggests, but the essential point is that the trajectory of the
individual career that we study here is set in the play of these wider
forces. The emphasis falls upon Modernisme because it was this
movement which gave first a direction and then scope and relevance
to the artistic vocation of Alexandre de Riquer.
Ours is a case-study of a single facet of Modernisme's 'artistic
revolution' as depicted in the passage quoted at the beginning of this
chapter. In relation to the fundamental eclecticism of the movement,
we may easily understand why Great Britain should have served as
one major example of 'modernity' for Catalonia, as a model of
bourgeois nationhood and of cultural plenitude. William Morris and
the Arts and Crafts movement; the Pre-Raphaelite slant supplied to
symbolist aesthetics; The Yellow Book and The Studio; Ruskin's
pervasive ideas: these would become points of reference for those
artists and intellectuals equating 'movement in art' with the
'advancement of Catalonia'. Alexandre de Riquer's was a decisive
role in the introduction and assimilation in Catalonia of this specific
strand of influence. The particulars are incorporated into a life story
whose central thread is that of an absorbing dedication to Art.
CHAPTER II
THE LIFE OF AN ARTIST
Alexandre de Riquer was
born of a noble family on
May 3rd 1856 in the little
town of Calaf in central
Catalonia. His father, Marti
de Riquer, one of the principal leaders in Catalonia of
the reactionary Carlist movement, a cause which ruined
him, was the very prototype
of the country gentleman,
while his mother Elisea
Anglada, came from a
22
Alexandre de Riquer
Liberal family in Vilanova i la Geltrú, a family of artists and
intellectuals. After an early childhood spent on the family estates not
far from Calaf and in the Jesuit College in Manresa (1864-1867),
Alexandre lived with his mother for a brief spell in 1868 until his
father, in exile in France, enrolled him at the boarding school of
L'Immaculée Conception in Béziers. There, from 1869 to 1871, as
well as absorbing the French language, he showed a passionate
interest in the art and design courses. It was in Béziers that Riquer
painted the first canvasses of his apprenticeship, and it was there that
clear signs of a powerful artistic vocation, doubtless inherited from
his mother, came to be prominent in his life.
A brief involvement in the Carlist War of 1872, without his father's
knowledge, had him quickly brought back to the family estates
whence he departed once more for France. While following courses
at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Toulouse (1873-1874), probably as a
non-enrolled student, Riquer painted his first portraits and saw the
prospect of earning a living as a painter. Meanwhile, despite
continuing active collaboration with his father in the Carlist cause,
his mother in Barcelona obtained for him in March 1874 a pardon for
his subversive military adventure of 1872. In April he was thus able
to return to Barcelona and to enrol at the art school of La Llotja
where he was to study for several years under Tomàs Padró, Claudi
Lorenzale and, in particular, Antoni Caba, the teacher who he most
admired. In fact, though, the only painting we have from this stage in
Riquer's development is a landscape (1876) with an equestrian figure
in the foreground, a work which if anything displays the influence of
Marti i Alsina, a dissident teacher in La Llotja who was championing
a new realism in painting. It is from this period that Riquer's literary
vocation also dates, in the form of his poems Notas del alma (Notes of
my Soul), written virtually all in Castilian, a collection in which a
very elementary Romanticism is evident. This, on the one hand, is
indicative of the relative poverty and underdevelopment—in terms
both of themes and of linguistic normality—of Catalan literature at
the time. On the other hand, though, we see here the emergence of
some sentimental subjects that will receive more sophisticated
treatment in Riquer's later writing, and we see, even more significantly,
the beginnings of that conjunction between different artistic modes
that was to be so characteristic of the aesthetics of Modernisme.
With his family in dire economic straits, Riquer was obliged to set
his mind to earning a living in the only way he knew how. Through
The Life of an Artist
23
his friendship with the writer and illustrator Apel·les Mestres—a key
figure in early Modernisme—he was introduced into the world of
publishing. When the former left to travel in the summer of 1876
Riquer took over some of his work on ornamental lettering and cover
illustration. Thus began a long collaboration in the artistic side of
publishing which would remain a major facet of Riquer's creative
activity. Through his friendship with Mestres, who was to become a
sort of spiritual elder brother, the young artist made contact with the
group of intellectuals that included the mercurial Pompeu Gener,
Joaquim Bartrina, Simó Gómez, Enric Obiols and the brothers Josep
Maria and Fernando Arteaga. (the latter, as we shall see, to be
involved in Riquer's 'English connection'). His horizons were
broadening. By the end of the 1870s, moreover, Riquer was
beginning to enjoy some fame as an artist, with his first publicly
exhibited canvas in 1878 and with the publication in 1879 of a
drawing in the Madrid journal La Acadèmia.
Riquer shared the interest of his intellectual circle in Italian
literature, specifically Manzoni and Pelico, and eventually in 1879 he
obtained his father's permission to go to Rome to complete his
painting apprenticeship. He cannot have stayed very long in the
Italian capital, although he painted a few landscapes of the local
countryside in the highly detailed luminist style of the celebrated
Catalan painter Fortuny. Then came study travels to Pisa, Florence,
Genoa, Milan and Venice. He was particularly sensitive to the art of
the quattrocento painters, a clear sign of the eclecticism of his
generation which was attracted both to contemporary realism and to
a mythical medievalism associated with the Romantic cult of the
Gothic.
Riquer's journey brought him back through France, via Paris and,
according to some biographers, possibly via London in 1879,
although we have no evidence at all of this. There is certainly no
impression of London in Riquer's work of the 1880s. On his return to
Barcelona he resumed his work on the illustration of magazines and
books, which continued for some time to be his mainstay. In 1880 he
designed the title-page for the annual of La Ilustració Catalana and
for the same magazine, over several years, he drew the stylised floral
friezes framing portraits of dignitaries of the Jocs Florals poetry
festivals. He also contributed in 1882 and 1883 to the journal Artey
Letras where he published a number of ink drawings in a basically
realist style, a portrait of Wagner (enjoying something of a cult in
24
Alexandre de Riquer
Catalonia, soon to become a hero of the modernistes) and several
Italian sketches. He had returned to that country in 1881 and had
frequented the colony of Spanish artists settled in Rome, particularly
the Catalan Enric Serra with whom Riquer appears to have had
quite close intellectual contact.
In 1885 the artist married Dolors Palau Gonzalez de Quijano, the
daughter of a distinguished and cultivated family. The nuptial mass
was celebrated by the poet-priest Jacint Verdaguer and the witnesses
were the dramatist Àngel Guimerà and the poet-publisher Francesc
Matheu, clear indication of how Riquer was now moving in the
leading circles of that 'literary Catalanism' which bridged the
Renaixença and the age of Modernisme. Already, since 1882, the
artist was working from a garret studio in the Carrer Petritxol which
was a favourite haunt of the local intellectual set and their patrons.
Between 1886 and 1898 he fathered nine children (three of whom
died in infancy) and it was this responsibility with its attendant
economic pressures which doubtless gave added, even urgent
stimulus to Riquer's professional dedication, especially after the
death of his wife in 1899. His prolific activity as a book illustrator
during the 1880s was centred on the Arte y Letras collection, under
the direction of Lluís Domènech i Montaner, and it is here that the
pre-modernista 'aestheticism' directly inspired by Apel·les Mestres is
very evident: in the concern
for detail, in the precision of
the realistic touch, in the
predominance of floral or
animal themes, and in the
Japanese flavour of composition. Their common source
of inspiration was the Spanish
illustrator Daniel Urrabieta
Vierge, currently enjoying
great celebrity in Paris. In
addition it is clear that Riquer
drew heavily on the work of
the French artist Hector
Giacomelli, specifically his
superb plates for Andre
Theuriet's Nos Oiseaux, a
copy of which was owned by
Riquer.
25
Of equal note is the influence of the neo-Gothic current, especially
as typified by Viollet-le-Duc. The latter's stamp is visible in the six
compositions done by Riquer to illustrate the 1886 edition of the
traditional Catalan folksong Los Estudiants de Tolosa, based on some
earlier tapestry designs. The fact is that Riquer's increased productivity
around this time, encouraged by his domestic circumstances, was
facilitated by processes of change among the Catalan middle classes
who were gradually being 'educated' to the social and cultural value
of Art and being cultivated as consumers-patrons. The development
would not gather full momentum until Modernisme coalesced as a
movement in the following decade, nor would it foment or be
receptive to real stylistic innovation or adventurousness until that
same period. Nonetheless it can be seen that the origins of a
vocational 'professionalism' on the part of Catalan artists, per se and
in relation to a specific socio-cultural ethos, was a phenomenon of
the 1880s. And Riquer's individual trajectory was fully representative
of it. The diversification of his activity through the decade is to be
understood in this light. He did design work for the Masriera firm of
jewellers: interior and furniture decoration; programmes, dancecards and room decorations for high-class social occasions; japoniste
painting on vases for wrought iron-work by the architect C. Oliveras.
He participated in several painting exhibitions, with water-colours
and oils—on natural as well as allegorical subjects, moving into
religious painting with his Sant Julià Hospitalari (1886)—and in
1890 came his first one-man show at the Sala Parés, the premier
commercial gallery in Barcelona. Here he exhibited twenty-five
canvasses (of which fifteen were sold), realist landscapes serving to
frame close-ups of birds and featuring flowers and forests, all of
which were becoming fixed as favourite motifs of Riquer's pictorial
and literary creations. Symptomatically, the most ambitious of these
paintings, a Saint Francis with the birds, was criticised for being
insufficiently mystical in its treatment of the saint.
The Universal Exhibition of 1888 had a major part in putting
Barcelona on the map of Europe and in strengthening the Catalan
bourgeoisie's aspirations to cosmopolitanism and cultural modernity.
Beneficial repercussions were naturally felt by Catalan artists.
Riquer collaborated as a decorator with the architect Lluís Domènech i
Montaner who in so many ways personified the élan engendered by
the occasion. Domènech's spectacular International Hotel, demolished
immediately after the Exhibition, contained interior decorative work
26
Alexandre de Riquer
by Riquer, who also did the external ceramic designs for the
architect's retaurant El castell dels tres dragons. From this time also
dates his fireplace for Gaudí's Palau Güell where he gave a Neogothic rendering of the then fashionable theme of Saint Eh'zabeth of
Hungary.
The Universal Exhibition of Paris in the following year understandably acted as a magnet to many Catalan artists, Riquer among
them. He took advantage of this trip to visit the museum of Cluny,
fostering his already strong predilection
for medieval art in line with the teaching
of Viollet-le-Duc of whom he considered
himself to be an indirect disciple. The
latter's Dictionnaire raisonné du mobilier
français (1872-75) and Compositions et
dessins de Viollet-le-Duc (1884) were in
Riquer's library, and this influence (and
example) was no doubt instrumental in
turning the Catalan's creative attention
to decorative art and furniture. In 1892
he opened with his cousin Manel a
studio in Barcelona which specialised in
ebony work and in architectural-cuminterior decoration for which Alexandre
drew the plans. Very little is known of
the output of this short-lived enterprise
(which closed in 1893 when Manel
embarked on a vandàlic adventure to
find treasure in the monastery of Poblet),
although the surviving drawings in the
family archive show a predominant
Neo-gothic style subjected to the sort of
simplification applied by contemporary
British designers. That the workshop
produced artefacts of a high technical
quality is evidenced, though, by the fact
that the only gold medal in the Spanish
section of the 1893 Chicago Exhibition
was awarded to A. Riquer and Company
of Barcelona for a 'well-designed' chest,
'a superior piece of cabinet work'.
27
The Paris Exhibition of 1889 opened Riquer's eyes in another
quarter also. The contemplation and study of the contemporary
painting on display there, in particular the Pre-Raphaelite paintings
in the English section, affected him profoundly. Henceforth his own
work would enter a more idealistic phase, characterised by the
virtual disappearance of his bird motifs, becoming more religious in
flavour and marked by a distinct thematic shift, from an iconography
of saints and hermits to one based on the Virgin Mary. Perhaps what
is seen here are the first resonances of the Pre-Raphaelite and
Symbolist movements, with their idealised cult of feminine purity.
Continuity is evident, nevertheless, in the blending of spiritualised
themes with a still realistic treatment of landscape. His Entre lliris
(1889-90), the Santa Pastora shown at Chicago in 1893 and a
startling Annunciation exhibited at the Barcelona Athenaeum in
1893 are the best instances of a distinct renovation in Riquer's
painting in this line, neatly characterised as 'bucolic-mystical' by the
percipient Raimon Casellas.
With the emergence in the early 1890s of political Catalanism, and
its steady consolidation through the decade, an important new
ingredient came to bear on Riquer's ideological make-up. The
commitment to Catalanism would from now on interact with his
deeply held religious convictions that had earlier been channelled
into the extreme ultramontane values of Carlism. The mentor in this
develoment was Domènech i Montaner, with whom Riquer was
working at the time, and it was he who sponsored in 1888 his
membership of the pioneer Catalanist party, the Lliga de Catalunya.
The combination of a now more forward-looking patriotism with
confessionalism in the artist would be evident again, some years
later, in his immediate response to the sculptor Joan Llimona's
proposal for the creation of a Catholic artistic association, to be
called the Círculo artístico de San Lucas. Riquer no doubt saw in this
a potential resurgence of the medieval confraternities, a brotherhood
united in the ideal of Art. The catalanisation of the name, to Cercle
Artistic de Sant Lluc, was certainly indicative of the enterprise's
growing nationalist identification, but this was underpinned by a
zealous Catholicism which discharged itself in a basically conservative
and traditionalist version of Catalanist politics. In this respect the
authority of Josep Torras i Bages, author of La tradició catalana
(1892) and future Bishop of Vic, was decisive. Riquer was certainly in
his element here. He was a member of the Cercle's first steering
28
Alexandre de Riquer
committee and participated in all its biennial exhibitions beginning
with the one at the Sala Parés in 1893, where he showed two religious
canvasses.
An event of capital importance in Riquer's development, one
which would turn him away from the sort of conservative religious
zeal that he might have been fixed into, was his journey to London in
May-June 1894. In letters from his wife there are complaints about
her husband's long absence, and one can suspect that important
personal or commissioned business was the motive of the journey,
connected with his activities as an art collector. The fact, anyway, is
that in England Riquer encountered an artistic milieu which
accorded with his own beliefs and aspirations. The Pre-Raphaelites,
Burne-Jones in particular, provided him with examples of a totally
renewed medievalism. William Morris and the Arts and Crafts
Movement offered him a doctrine which could validate his hitherto
disparaged efforts in Catalonia as a decorative artist. Finally, the
British Art Nouveau movement, propagated after 1893 in the
beautiful journal The Studio, furnished him with a stylistic model,
moving him towards a higher degree of stylisation in his own
decorative idiom which would now be freed from attachment to
excessive realism and to a too literal or unmediated Gothicism.
When Riquer returned to London in 1906 it was as Commissioner
for the English section of the 1907 Barcelona Exhibition of Beaux
Arts and Industrial Arts. He was evidently chosen for the post on
account of his authority in this area and on account of his contacts in
this important sector of the international art world. In a sense the
two visits to Britain frame the heyday of Riquer's artístic career.
There has perhaps been a tendency in recent studies, however, to
overstate the impact on Riquer of his discoveries in British art. The
fact is that before 1894 the Catalan was a Pre-Raphaelite without
realising it. The adoption of this manner and his departures explicitly
under this sign thus respond neither to fashion nor to crude
imitation. As we have seen, he had been a committed decorativist
and had tended constantly, albeit under a predominantly French
influence, towards aesthetic idealism. What he discovered in
London, then, as Riquer himself acknowledged to F. Arteaga, in an
article published in The Studio itself in 1900, was a catalysing
inspiration, a conjoint creative model and the urge 'to proclaim these
hitherto unknown glories in Catalonia'. The artist became a
missionary at just the time when the cultural atmosphere in
29
Catalonia, with Modernisme's banner fully unfurled, was propitious
to reception of his message.
Riquer's principal medium, of course, would be his own art, and
this underwent a distinct stylistic change from 1894. He adopted a
blend of the Gothic and japonisme so characteristic of Art Nouveau,
that expressive quality of line enclosing flat surfaces imbued with
subtle harmonies of colour, which gives the composition an
antirealist feel in line with the idealised, symbolist subject matter:
international Art Nouveau. From 1895 onwards Riquer was the
outstanding figure in modernista decorative art, in an increasingly
responsive situation, encouraged and sustained in particular by the
achievements of the brilliant architects of Modernisme headed by the
genius of Gaudí.
The years 1895-1907—the apogee of Modernisme in all art forms—
were a period of intense activity and projection for Riquer as
protagonist of the 'new art'. His assimilation of aestheticism and the
Arts and Crafts ideal gave him
justification for continued diversification. His literary output increased
and developed in parallel to his
plastic creations, a relationship we
shall explore in our next chapters.
Likewise it was the Arts and
Crafts which, as well as placing
emphasis upon individual craftsmanship, raised the status of industrial
art, reconciling refinement and
aesthetic excellence with largescale production. Accordingly, the
modern industrial means of artistic
reproduction—posters, book-plates,
printing, etching and engravingwould become his favourite fields
of activity.
The cultivation of poster-work
was taken up by several major
modernista artists as a mode of
expression and communication
felt to be particularly attuned to
the spirit of the age. It is, indeed,
one of Modemisme's most innovatory
30
Alexandre de Riquer
and representative phenomena, and it was Riquer who was responsible
for the first modern Catalan poster, done for the third Exhibition of
Arts and Art Industries, Barcelona 1896. This first effort, oblong in
shape and somewhat cluttered in design, still displays an incomplete
fusion of Neo-gothic motifs and Pre-Raphaelite allegory, but its
pioneering status is undenied. Moreover, the style of Riquer's posters
was soon evolving rapidly in a more imaginative direction and with a
more relaxed feel, very close in aspect to the poster-work of the
Belgian Symbolists Privat-Livemont and Edmond Meunier. This
was clearly a direct line of influence, since Riquer possessed a copy of
A. Demeure de Beaumont's L'Affiche illustrée (Vol. I, L'Affiche beige,
1897), a book to which he referred in an article of 1899, Cartells y
cartellistas published in La Renaixensa. The Belgians (PrivatLivemont, Mignot, Henri Meunier) here occupied pride of place,
confirmed by Riquer's ownership of the former's L'Absinthe Robette
together with signed copies of Meunier's Les Concerts Isaye and
Casino de Blackenbergue. The latter's influence on the Catalan artist
is visible in the simplicity of composition, in the harmony of pastel
shades and in the Symbolist orientation of themes. Nonetheless, the
beginnings of this new departure were set in
Riquer's first trip to London in 1894. It is
clear that he discovered there the modern
poster and that the idea of propagating the
form was embraced as a missionary undertaking.
Arteaga recorded the artist's view of his role
here:
Posters! Why, ever since I saw the first of
the new posters the thing tempted me so
strongly that I offered to do tradesmen's
posters here [Barcelona] for nothing; not
one would listen to me.
The resistance was soon overcome, as is
evidenced by the twenty-odd posters produced
by Riquer between 1896 and 1902, of which
the most noteworthy are the advertisements
for his own book Anyoranses and Encerados J.
Ricart, the Salon Pedal and IV Exposició del
Circol de St. Lluch 1899, and Napoleon for
the photographers A. and E. Fernandez.
31
Another area in which Riquer was a true innovator, in the full
spirit of Modernisme, was that of the book-plate, like the poster a
typical and fashionable product of the new art. A few samples date
from the 1880s, but these, it seems, were designs not originally
intended to serve as book-plates. The real stimulus to the artist in
this respect appears to have been the special Christmas number of
The Studio for 1898 which was devoted to these items. As in the case
of posters, the initial impulse to adopt and introduce this artistic
speciality into Catalonia stemmed from Riquer's discovery of the
English models. What is remarkable, though, is how underivative
and confidently original are his own creations in the form. They
display a control and a unique poetic quality which made Riquer an
indisputable master of the European book-plate at the turn of the
century.
It was the great contemporary collector, the German Count
Leiningen-Westerburg, who financed publication of the book Exlibris d'Alexandre de Riquer, printed in 1903 by J. Furnó in
Barcelona and by Gieseche & Devrient of Leipzig. It is one of the
rarest but undoubtedly one of the finest artistic achievements of
Modernisme, conceived, designed and decorated by the artist who
gathered together within it his first 63 book-plates. His total output
over the period 1900-1914, as catalogued by Joan-Lluís Yebra, was
142 individual commissions, either etchings or photo-gravured
drawings. Their quantity and quality have a socio-cultural interest,
in what they reveal of Modernisme's effects in cultivating the
sensibility and cultural consumerism of influential sectors of the
Catalan bourgeoisie. Beyond this they add up to an important body
of creative work in harmony with an industrialised culture, a
phenomenon which is complemented by Riquer's production across
the whole field of commercial graphic art, from watermarks,
trademarks, letter-heads and publishers' insignia to advertisements,
magazine and sheet-music covers, as well as almost the enure range
of minor forms of the printer's trade: visiting cards, menus,
invitations, Christmas cards, programmes and dance-cards, First
Communion and In Memoriam cards, catalogues, invoices, not
forgetting that important turn-of-the-century phenomenon, the
artistic illustrated post-card. For most of these delightful compositions
Riquer limited himself merely to providing the design, but a number
were also skilfully engraved by him, generally by the etching process,
a technique in which he was one of the most accomplished
practitioners in Catalonia.
32
Alexandre de Riquer
33
Indeed, Riquer's contribution to the general reemergence of
quality engraving in Catalonia is not to be underestimated. Copper
engraving had virtually died out in Barcelona, succumbing to
photochemical proceses. The engraving studio at the art school of La
Llotja had had to close in 1879, for want of students. The rebirth of
engraving, in particular etching, in the last years of the nineteenth
century was largely due to the upsurge of interest from bibliophiles
and the associated growth in demand for book-plates. Riquer's
experience, and his familiarity with the beautiful work produced in
Catalonia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, placed him in
the forefront of reviving the art. He had a press brought over from
London in 1894 or slightly later, and began to engrave in his studio in
the Carrer de la Freneria. There two young followers, J. Triadó and J.
Renart, were introduced to the techniques of etching, soon to be
imitated by a wave of book-plate designers, in particularly by Casals i
Vernís who worked in Reus. Riquer was in a true sense the master of
this development. His first prize for engraving at the 1906 National
Art Exhibition in Madrid and first-class medal at the 1907 International
Art Exhibition in Barcelona were his appropriate recognition.
The extraordinary quality of Riquer's achievements in the related
field of book illustration and decoration also merits special comment.
One is struck by the radical shift in style between the work done
before his 1894 visit to London and that which followed. The covers
and illustrations which he produced from 1895 to 1898 for the New
Year editions of La Ilustración Artística, published by Muntaner y
Simón, show him fully in control of an expressive new idiom.
Beardsley's japonisme is again smoothly blended with a William
Morris Gothic in flat, decorative compositions, harmoniously tinted
in pastel, particularly graceful in the friezes to texts of Cervantes
(1897) and Quevedo (1898). One notes here too the reiterated
presence of allegorical feminine themes inside the decorative frames,
clearly deriving from European Symbolism. Another dimension of
this specific artistic importation in which Riquer was actively
involved was the foundation in 1897 of the journal Luz, the most
explicitly Symbolist of early Modernisme's vehicles. The format itself
was typically elongated, and Riquer designed several intricately
elegant compositions for the cover, like the one reproduced in our
Chapter I. Their movement is distinctly vertical, with lightly-clad
sprites seeming poised ready to fly upwards into the sky of the
picture, towards the source of a mystical light (the meaning of Luz)
34
Alexandre de Riquer
whose rays penetrate their ecstatic eyes. The same illustrations were
also used in Riquer's collection of prose-poems, Crisantemes (1899),
one of the most subtle fusions of the artist's dual vocation. This
volume and Anyoranses (1902) constitute together perhaps the finest
attainment of modernista book production, anticipated to a degree in
the illustrations for Riquer's autobiographical Quan jo era noy
(1897). In the earlier work, though, the style is still transitional, as
the literary content is more conventional, and the modernista
stylisation is seen emerging from a realism that harks back to the
1880s. A clear example of this is the vignette which heads the present
chapter. Crisantemes and Anyoranses, on the other hand, are totally
coherent in their effect. The stylised decorativism of the illustrations,
the integration of text and image, the asymmetrical positioning of the
print on the page, the small oblong format itself, all combine to make
these exquisite models of Art Nouveau aesthetics in book production,
wherein refinement of design reflects the preciousness of the
writing.
Riquer's fourth book Aplech de sonets. Les Cullites. Un poema
d'amor (1906), shows a distinct evolution in both aspects, related to
contemporary cultural developments in Catalonia. The decorative
elements are now tempered by a balance and a deliberate formal
symmetry which announce, as does the exclusive use of the sonnet
form, the return to a type of classicism, a current which was to swell
into Noucentisme's rejection of modernista taste and ideology.
Perhaps symptomatic of Riquer's own uncertainty in the face of the
eventual dissolution of artistic Modernisme is the fact that he chose
not to illustrate himself his long sylvan poem, Poema del Bosch
(1910), preferring instead to use xylographic vignettes taken from
seventeenth-century originals. The subject matter of the poetry
would have seemed anachronistic already in 1910, in relation to the
noucentista cult of the urbane, while the concept of the illustration
(and the total visual effect of the book) reflects perhaps Riquer's
misapprehension of what the new movement's classicism entailed.
The disjunction is indicative of a major tide-change in Catalan
culture or cultural Catalanism.
The foregoing survey has aimed to give an idea of the fundamental
role played by Alexandre de Riquer, as decorative artist, in the
incorporation and development of Art Nouveau in the graphic arts in
Catalonia. His pioneering effort and his confidence in applying a
new, culturally appropriate idiom across a whole range of printed
35
products were his positive contributions to Catalan art. He attracted
a group of disciples to whom he generously opened the doors of his
studio and library: J. Triadó, J. Renart, J. Diéguez, Jaume Llongueras,
F. Galí, E. Moya. Part of the mainstream of modernista artistic
expression, then, derived directly from him. Even Eugeni d'Ors, the
high-priest of Noucentisme, recognised Riquer's mentorship and
recalled his studio as 'the only seminary of true art... in Barcelona'.
In similar vein it was the idealist painter Joan Brull, also art critic of
the leading journal Joventut, who summed up the historical
importance of Riquer's role as pioneer of an Arts and Crafts spirit in
Catalonia:
Some great English artists had begun to cultivate and promote
decorative work, so successfully that it became a unique art form in
its own right. The Germans, the Danes and the Northern countries
all together followed suit. We are fortunate to have an artist who is
inspired in that same tradition: Riquer.
Decorative painting, in effect, which Riquer had begun to practise
in the 1880s, forms as decisive a contribution to the modernista
canon as does his work in the graphic arts. Again there is a
discernible surge in creativity after 1894. Of particular note are the
two large vertical panels for the choir of the abbey church of
Montserrat, done in collaboration (1896) with colleagues from the
Cercle de Sant Lluc, and the paintings in the house of Sra. Alomar in
the Passeig de Gràcia (1897), four panels representing the seasons
with two others in the form of allegories of Poetry and Music.
This was an activity which Riquer fluently extended into
architectural decoration, now under a distinctly modernista sign of
'total art'. In 1900 he designed the entire project for decoration of his
relative Grau Ynglada's chemist-shop on the corner of the Carrer
Nou de la Rambla, calling in Gaspar Homar to execute the
marquetry and Granell to do the stained-glass work. The Arts and
Crafts spirit was fully exemplified here, as it was in so many of
Modernisme's finest and most lasting achievements. Among these
must surely be counted Riquer's work on decoration of the lobby of
the Cercle del Liceu, also begun in 1900. His designs for the
furnishings and gas-lamps, combining wood, metal and enamelling (a
technique he pioneered), show the artist at his most assured and
delicate. A further important commission, also dating from around
1900, was to decorate the Great Hall of the Industrial Institute in
Terrassa near Barcelona, an occasion which can be seen as part of the
36
Alexandre de Riquer
coming of age of modernista interior decoration, now given institutional
sanction. The accord between Art and the industrial establishment
was, however, symptomatically short-lived. There was a serious
disagreement with the Board of Governors of the Institute, who were
shocked by the allegorical nudes representing the textile industry and
commerce on the huge symbolic ceiling, an up-dated version of a
grand Puvis de Chavannes wall-painting. The artist refused to clothe
his nudes and left for Barcelona, his project unfinished. It was
completed several years later by Vancells, and Riquer's original work
can now be viewed in the Casa-Museu Alegre de Sagrera in Terrassa.
Another important legacy of Riquer to the town was the interior
decoration of the Cafè Català which was done by the brothers Pere
and Tomàs Viver under his supervision.
Resettled in Barcelona, Riquer found his
services as a designer in great (and, one must
presume, remunerative) demand. The diversity
of his commissions and the importance of the
sources from which they came indicate the
solvency of his professional position. He
painted in 1903 part of the decor of La Maison
Dorée, the cafe-restaurant of his friends the
brothers Pompidor, and in 1905 he was in
charge of interior decoration for La Vaqueria
Catalana. During this period he was also busy
designing patterns for the celebrated mosaics of Escofet y Tejera.
Jewellery also engaged his attention, and in one particularly wellcrafted piece—a brooch representing Saint George and the Dragon,
whose oval centre-piece reproduced the motif of the banner of the
Unió Catalanista—Riquer combined this specialism with that of
designing political and associational banners, for which he was in
much demand. It was, in a sense, the artist's point of direct contact
with the political and cultural ferment of the times. But it was Art
itself which was the absorbing concern, a situation made possible by
the fashionable generalisation of the modernista idiom. Furnishings
and candelabra, stained glass for the firm of A. Rigalt & Co., playing
cards for the successful firms of Comas and Fournier: the surge of
creativity was fomented by a socio-cultural context towards which
the artist himself had contributed, a relatively normalised relationship
between the creator of aesthetic values and his capitalist clientele.
Consonant with this exclusive and consuming dedication to Art
37
were Riquer's private activities as a connoisseur and collector of art
works and antiques. It was a passion which he shared with some
other guiding spirits of Modernisme, and Joseph Pla writes of a trip to
the Pyrenees, as early as 1887, by Riquer, Santiago Rusinol and M.
Utrillo, in search of antiques. Their frequenting of art-dealers and
connoisseur-ship can be seen, of course, as a significant dimension of
cultivating the market for their own products. Riquer certainly
assembled an imposing collection of items related to his own
specialisms: different types of graphic art, antique book-bindings, old
manuscripts, and prints, and, above all, book-plates of which he
owned over two-thousand examples. His substantial collection of
antique glass was bought from him in 1902 for 8,000 pesetas by
Rusinol. In addition he put together an appreciable collection of
drawings by celebrated masters, Eugenio Lucas in particular, which
are now held in the Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona. Before his
departure for Majorca in 1917 he sold the bulk of his collections of
papers and watermarks to the widow Wenceslao Guarro, the owner
of the former stationery firm of that name. His library and the
undispersed part of his collections were acquired after his death by
the Barcelona Museums and the National Library of Catalonia.
There is no doubt that the heyday of Riquer's career was the
period from 1895 to 1907 and that this coincided virtually exactly
with the heyday of Modernisme itself. With one foot in the camp of
literature and the other in that of the visual arts, he embodied the
modernista virtues of the artist as cultural stimulator and privileged
public spokesman. In 1898 he served as mantenidor of the literary
Jocs Florals, while in 1900 he was first artistic director and art critic
of the great modernista journal Joventut (whose decorative heading
he had designed: see the reproduction in Chapter I). Beyond this,
however, on account of his experiences and affinities, Riquer played
an important 'diplomatic' role in bridging and reconciling a
fundamental divergence of aesthetic currents, with ideological
implications, within Modernisme. The basic rift was between ideas of
Art in the service of Religion and those of a 'post-Christian' Art for
Art's sake, in both of which tendencies Riquer had participated just
as he was a proponent of the Symbolist aesthetic that offered the
possibility of synthesis. His involvement in the journal Luz, already
mentioned, is indication of the spiritual kinship and artistic unity
that linked Riquer, under the sign of Symbolism, with 'decadents'
like Rusinol and Utrillo, complementing their shared enthusiasm for
38
Alexandre de Riquer
art collecting. Further, another triad of archetypal modernistes—
Riquer, Rusinol and Adrià Gual—converged on this same point
through their common interest in exploring the potential of the
Symbolist prose-poem in Catalan. It was the trip to London which
broadened his horizons and loosened Riquer's ties with militant
Catholic conservatism. Without abandoning allegiance to his mentor
Torras i Bages or to Catholic colleagues like Vancells and the
Llimona brothers from the Cercle de Sant Lluc, Riquer was naturally
drawn closer to more restless spirits and radical innovators like
Rusinol, Casas, Utrillo and Raimon Casellas.
There was a brief period of relative unity in Catalan Modernisme,
coalescing around the time of the fourth Festa Modernista in Sitges
held in 1897, where most of the above-mentioned figures participated.
Utrillo himself wrote a preface for the 1903 publication of Riquer's
collected Ex-libris, and he published a number of these plates in the
impressively elegant journal Pèl & Ploma of which he was the editor.
Relations between Riquer and the influential critic-novelist Casellas
were more strained, but, although they had profound differences, the
two men respected each other. Between 1895 and 1911 the critic
published virtually nothing unfavourable in reviews of the artist's
work, and the two collaborated in several important cultural
undertakings, notably preparations for the International Art Exhibitions
of 1907 and 1911. It cannot be denied, though, that, put to the test,
Riquer's deepest affiliations were ideologically conservative. During
a polemic concerning the respective merits of drawings by Casas and
Josep Llimona, it was Torras i Bages who had the last word and
prevailed on him to resign in July 1900 after a very short spell of
involvement in Joventut, the last major organ of Modernisme, of
which Riquer had been a co-founder but which the Bishop judged to
be 'divorced from Catholic norms'. The crisis did not put an end to
his critical writing even so: Riquer continued to write copiously on
contemporary art and to be its proponent right up to his death in
Majorca in 1920.
What is clear from his correspondence and the contents of his
library is that from 1911, the date of his marriage to the French
writer Marguerite Laborde, Riquer's lines of communication with
the world of British art were virtually severed. The date was a
significant watershed, where personal factors coincided with the
deepening crisis of the artistic values with which Riquer was
associated, including that important 'new art' component which he
39
had implanted partly from British sources. After 1911, Noucentisme's
repudiation of the supposedly chaotic, dissolvent and self-indulgent
aspects of the fin de siècle was in clear ascendancy... But following
this line takes us too rapidly towards the end of the story, and we
should return to the earlier stage when Modernisme's aesthetic ideal
remained valid.
Utterly devoted to Art and to his vocation, Riquer had created
around himself, in his studio in the Carrer de la Freneria, close to
Barcelona Cathedral, a unique atmosphere, an island of resistance to
philistine materialism and base commercialism, an aesthetic paradise
which offered a welcome to like-minded young artists. We have
already observed Eugeni d'Ors' admiration of this shrine or 'only
seminary of true art'. It was the venue for musical evenings, Mozart
and Beethoven being the revered favourites, and the sanctuary of
Riquer's precious collection of objets d'art. Many other contemporaries
have testified to the spiritual atmosphere of the studio, the most
succinctly representative being the account given by the critic
Manuel de Montoliu. Highlighting Riquer's championship of the
English Pre-Raphaelites, headed by the painter-poet Dante Rossetti,
Montoliu goes on to recall the following episode which we can take to
be typical:
His studio contained for us, in addition to the lure of discussion,
the attraction of the great art journals that were received mainly
from England and Germany. At that time I was immersed in
reading the Divine Comedy. My enthusiasm for the great Florentine
knew no bounds. What joy to discover that Riquer was as
passionate an admirer of the great Italian poet as I! He and two of
my friends... agreed to meet twice a week in his studio for sessions
on Dante in which we would read together and discuss the Divine
Comedy. We did so with exemplary constancy for several months...
One night, at the conclusion of the session, Riquer, without
uttering another word, rose and, after extinguishing the lights,
suddenly drew back the curtain of the large windows. We were
struck dumb with amazement. He had revealed to us a magical
world. High above the moon rode in a clear sky, spilling its silvery
light over the pinnacles, gargoyles, windows and capitals, an
enchanted forest of stony vegetation which crowned the rich
Gothic architecture of the apse of our cathedral!
This temple of Modernisme within Barcelona—more intimate,
more restrained than Rusiñol's celebrated and spectacular Cau
Ferrat in Sitges, the home of the Festes Modernistes—was tacitly
40
Alexandre de Riquer
dedicated to the cult and memory of Lolita, the artist's wife and
soulmate, who had died in 1899. It was closer to another pocket of
poetic resistance that was even more secret and hermetically sealed
from the sounds of the outside world, namely the home of Apel·les
Mestres in the Passeig Permanyer, to which only a few friends and,
interestingly, their children were invited. For this 'chosen few' there
must have been the sense of the aesthetes' dream being fulfilled, of
work and living being harmonically assimilated to Art and Beauty.
The dream could not last...
In another dimension, Riquer, like many contemporary Catalan
intellectuals, maintained good relations with the Spanish artists and
writers of Madrid. Their respective cultural regenerationism, and to
a degree common philosophical and aesthetic influences, momentarily
disguised the incipient divergences that would mark the twentiethcentury page of the history of Catalonia within the Spanish state.
Riquer contributed to Madrid journals which were sympathetic
towards Catalan Modernisme and which even gave the phenomenon
a certain prominence, such as La Lectura edited by Francisco Acebal
and La Vida Literària edited by Jacinto Benavente. The date of
Riquer's first trip to Madrid is uncertain, but it is known that he
went frequently to Castile and the capital in search of antiques and
to attend the biennial National Art Exhibitions, where he was a goldmedal winner in 1906. Before that, in 1902, he attended the
coronation celebrations of Alfonso XIII and had then discovered the
world of the Madrid literary cafes presided over by the legendary
Valle-Inclán. Another leading figure of Spanish Modernismo, Miguel
de Unamuno, was a friend of the tutor to Riquer's children, Luis de
Zulueta, and visited the family in Barcelona. A friendship with Angel
Ganivet, author of the influential Idearium español, was struck up
during a visit by Riquer to Andalusia. The Spanish dimension of the
Catalan artist's horizons, then, was present as it was in the case of
another great modernista, the poet Joan Maragall.
In the early years of the twentieth century Riquer underwent
considerable ideological development. It is true that he maintained
contact with Bishop Torras i Bages. The latter, while he was a
governor of the Cercle de Sant Lluc, often dined at the Riquer home
and engaged in spirited arguments with Zulueta, a rebellious freethinker, whose position in the household was therefore rather
anomalous unless it was an indication of a certain private heterodoxy
on the artist's part. The fact is that Riquer had become interested in
41
Theosophy—enjoying something of a boom among the aesthetic
intelligentsia throughout Europe—even though he never became a
member of the Theosophical Society. He frequented the Llibreria
Orientalista of Raymon Maynadé, and after the turn of the century
there is discernible in his creative work a drift away from JudaeoChristian conceptions and conventions.
Although Riquer may appear to have deferred to Torras i Bages by
ceasing contributions to Joventut, there runs through his pictorial
and poetic work of this period a line of feeling that stands in clear
opposition to the Bishop's conservative moralising. His mature
creations show an imagination engaged with some of the erotic and
pantheistic implications of his artistic philosphy's broadest reaches.
Once again, his writing and his pictorial work converge in the one
direction. Nor was Riquer alone in this: there is a pantheistic strain
in the poetry of Maragall, with very profound Romantic roots, which
likewise drew sanction from the
Bishop, and several other
modernista artists and writers
reviewed the human condition
in terms of dark, pagan atavisms.
In a series of paintings and
drawing dated beteen 1906 and
1910 Riquer returned to the
world of pagan antiquity with
its nymphs and satyrs symbolising'
the cyclical (ritual) and organic forces
of that favourite domain of his earlier
work, the forest, where now strange
trees are transformed into coupling
human bodies. Alongside themes
drawn from classical antiquity (Leda
the swan being a particularly notable
instance) we encounter also medieval
reminiscences, focused on the Arthurian
legends, the common denominator
being that of place, the forest, the
undergrowth of Riquer's childhood
in La Segarra. An identical movement
is found in his last poetic work, the
ambitious and curiously regressive
42
Alexandre de Riquer
Poema del Bosch of 1910. One of the great paradoxes of this complex
artístic personality, of a man who was among the most outstanding
cultivated temperaments of his day, was this final application of his
vast cultural breadth to the worship of Nature, a trend that was to
grow in strength during the last decade of his life. One line of
explanation would certainly centre on the anti-modernista fixation of
Noucentisme, —at its most emphatic around 1910—, on its very
particularised, exclusive interpretation of urbanity in art, and on the
consequent restraints applied to artistic freedom.
Another factor in this reorientation was doubtless the new
development in his emotional life dating from 1910-11. Now aged 54,
he met in Barcelona Marguerite Laborde, a Béarnaise writer from
Oloron Sainte Marie who used the pen-names of Andrée de Beam
and Hein!. Marguerite was introduced to Riquer's circle by Octave
Uzanne, the great French bibliophile and friend of his sister Augusta.
The couple fell in love and were married in Oloron Sainte Marie in
September, 1911. They lived for a while in the Pyrenees, and it was
here that the artist rediscovered landscape. He put much feeling into
his paintings of the Pyrenean forests and cool undergrowth. He
exhibited these works in Pau in 1912, and in 1912-13 he had three
exhibitions of an ever-widening range of landscapes from the places
(Andalusia, Majorca and Ibiza) that he visited in these years. These
exhibitions were held at the still-prestigious Sala Parés and at the
Fayans Català: their contents displayed a concentration of subject
matter and a vitality of treatment such that they amount to a kind of
affirmation of principle. The cultural tide had turned in Catalonia:
the modernista had become an embattled figure. Riquer's life-work
and stock-in-trade of decorative art, his style so intimately associated
with Modernisme, were suddenly declared out-moded by the new
opinion-makers. Except in the field of book-plate design, the artist
was no longer in demand. It was reliably reported in 1913 that he was
even considering emigration to Argentina.
Riquer's authority waned, then, as Noucentisme reached its
apogee. In 1913-14 he added his voice to the movement of disquiet
over Torres García's ceiling painting in the Saló de Sant Jordi of the
Generalitat palace, the seat of the recently achieved semi-autonomous
government of Catalonia. Riquer's platform was, significantly, set
outside the capital (he wrote in the journal La Sembra of Terrassa)
and he was contradicting a man of the new establishment, Alexandre
Galí. The latter had praised Torres García's paintings for their
43
simplicity and synthetic quality: Riquer criticised them for what he
saw as poverty of style. It is too facile an interpretation, though, to
see in this confrontation an irreconcilable conflict of antithetical
artistic values and cultural orthodoxies. Such a version, which has
been current until recently, harks back ultimately to the simplifications
of Noucentisme's own propaganda. We can nowadays appreciate
better that, behind the disagreement, there lay the inability of the
displaced but still committed modernista to understand fully the
terms of a new aesthetic which emerged from a specific branch of
Modernisme itself. However, if our present-day perspective gives us a
clear view of the real complexities and continuities in the relationship
between Modernisme and Noucentisme, it is none the less true that
the tide-change left many modernistes as stranded victims.
Charcoal drawing of Alexandre de Riquer by R. Casas
Despite relative success in terms of public response and sales from
his exhibitions, Riquer now felt that he was fighting a rearguard
action in Barcelona and he underwent a movement of relying
increasingly on his own inner resources and artistic vision. To the
weighty cultural factors in this must be added family misfortune
which turned 1914 into a bleak year for him. He was forced to
44
Alexandre de Riquer
separate from his wife Marguerite who was incompatible with his
daughter Emilia; his eldest son Emili died in a typhus epidemic, and
another son, Alexandre, died in the following year. The artist's
isolation was thus increased in the most poignant way. The outbreak
of the First World War also affected him. In line with most Catalan
intellectuals, who felt the German aggression to be a threat to small
nations, he supported the Allies, but, above all, he was moved by the
collective tragedy and by the desire for peace.
Riquer sought refuge in painting and in the associated travelling.
In April 1915 he mounted a large exhibition at the Fayans Català,
divided into four sections: Spain, a return to the world of Goya and
the Romantics, inspired perhaps by the works of Eugenio Lucas in
his own collection; Ibiza and Majorca, landscapes treated on a scale
larger than before; The Lower Pyrenees, French landscapes characterised
by a strikingly fresh realism; and Miscellany, where Riquer remained
faithful to his fay-world full of literary and musical allusions, tightly
controlled within a small format. This exhibition brought him public
and critical acclaim for what was felt to be a brave new departure. A
banquet was given in his honour on May 1st, 1915, by the Barcelona
artists of his generation, all of them modernistes. Not a single
noucentista was on the guest-list.
This success did not prevent Riquer, wearied by the tensions and
the feuding in Barcelona, from leaving the Catalan capital in search
of peace and rest in Majorca, where he had painted around 1913-14,
and where he was to spend the remaining years until his death in
1920. He invited his closest friends and associates to a farewell
supper in their favourite restaurant, the Lion d'Or, on March 27th,
1917, before sailing with his children to Majorca. He took a house in
the Terreno district of Palma, and devoted himself to landscape
painting. However, unlike his earlier travels, it was not now a case of
being in the right place at the right time.
In a sense Riquer went too late to Majorca, where Anglada
Camarasa was already installed and had made fashionable a broad,
decorative approach to landscape, all light and vivid colours, very
different from the former's detailed realism, now beginning to look
quite old-fashioned. In fact, Riquer continued to paint as though
Impressionism had not transformed the art of landscape, almost as
though it had never existed. His exhibitions at the Círculo Mallorquín
in April 1918 and May 1919, then in the salons of the La Veda society
in January 1920 were appreciated more by the insular and conservative
45
Majorcan upper classes than by the many young landscape artists
living there. Their criticism was that the elderly Catalan artist never
mastered the problem of light on the Golden Isle, on account of his
excessively conventional technique.
These were the declining years. In an excellent obituary, a highly
cultivated journalist who was one of Riquer's Majorcan friends,
Miguel Sarmiento, gives us a vision of Riquer in the tranquility of
this semi-retirement at Son Alegre:
He worked in the mornings. That is to say, he sometimes worked,
and sometimes, on the pretext of looking for something, he would
delve into his sketch-books as if he were trying to console himself
with his memories of other times. At noon he would go down to
Palma, visit a few friends, buy newspapers, browse through the
bookshop, call at the antique-dealer's; and then, the tram home. He
never went out in the evenings.
Riquer painted rather more than Sarmiento suggests, and he also
continued, sporadically, to write poetry. Although relatively isolated
from the outside world, he retained some contact with the Catalan
cultural world of the mainland through his son Josep Maria, a
restless bohemian who hovered around the Barcelona literary circles.
It was Josep Maria who took to the Lion d'Or group a poem of
greetings which contrasted the peace of Majorca with the violence
raging in Europe, and which vehemently declared Riquer's support
for the Allies.
Two articles which Riquer contributed to the journal Mallorca in
November 1917 set up a striking contradiction, one which, however,
on inspection, can be seen to represent a dynamic pull in his own
artistic trajectory, even a sort of summary of the two main forces in
play within his total oeuvre. In the first, reviewing a collective
exhibition organised by La Veda, he invoked the Camille Mauclair of
Trois crises de l'art actuel in order to condemn the avant-garde and
defend the 'need for tradition, study and order'. The second, devoted
to an exhibition by the young Majorcan painter Canals and to a
group of young artists—Pons, Vidal, Salvà and Ferrà—quoted Oscar
Wilde to defend the superiority of Art over Nature: 'Art, according to
Wilde himself, is the burning protestation, the courageous endeavour
of Man to instruct Nature as to how She should be.' There was here,
perhaps, a sort of theoretical swan-song, as there was also a creative
one in Riquer's last two exhibitions. In 1920 he showed his Majorcan
landscapes in Catalonia, at the salon of the Casino Sabadellenc, and
46
Alexandre de Riquer
then again in the Sala Parés where he presented twenty-nine
canvasses. At the Paris Salon d'Automne in the same year he
participated, with Pine trees in Deyà and The Cove at Deyà, in the
exhibition of Catalan artists organised by the Municipal Committee
for Art Exhibitions in Barcelona. The organisers had invited the
Catalans to Paris in gratitude for the hospitality shown by Barcelona
on the occasion of the major exhibition of French art in 1917.
Characteristically, the swan-song had a range wider than painting
and took in Riquer's other principal enthusiasms. In 1919 the Círculo
Ecuestre de Barcelona commissioned him to make and decorate a de
luxe album to be presented to its president Albert Rusiñol. Riquer
was working on the decoration of this valuable album, with its
sumptuous presentation and its metal cover studded with precious
gems, truly the last word in Modernisme's cult of the book as
emblematic work of Art, when death suddenly overtook him on
November 13th, 1920. The designer Saurí Sires undertook completion
of the album, and it may be admired today at the Círculo
Ecuestre.
Some time before his death Riquer had effected a reconciliation
with his wife Marguerite, and she had come to join him in Majorca.
It was in the very year of his death that the artist published in poetic
form, in the catalogues of the 1920 exhibitions, a summary of his
aesthetics which was also his literary testament. The most telling
fragments of the poem, Credo, read as follows:
I live with my face to the light of the sunflowers and I believe in
myself, as I believe in an expansive Art that calms my aching soul,
for me alone...
I believe in the truth of plastic harmony, in breathable space,
distances and light in the sublime, peaceful magic of a beautiful
day, and in LIFE which is BEAUTY, in the ART which is its
perfume.
CHAPTER III
RIQUER THE WRITER (PROSE)
Recent studies by M. McCarthy (unpublished
doctoral dissertation, Cambridge Universty)
and M.A. Cerdà (Els Pre-rafaelites a Catalunya,
1981) have understandably given prominence
to the 'English connection'—specifically the
resonances of contemporary English poetry—
in their interpretations of the literary work of
Alexandre de Riquer. Such approaches,
however, while obviously consonant with our
general focus here, appear to us to be too
limited to provide a proper characterisation of
Riquer as a writer. The dangers of overemphasising Pre-Raphaelite influences and of
seeing in our subject's anglophilia a virtually exclusive motivation
have tended to remove the author from his immediate and true
context, which is that of the Catalan literature of Modernisme.
It is, moreover, a literary-historical context to which some special
considerations must apply. Riquer, like his contemporaries, took up
writing in Catalan in a crucial period when the language itself was in
a particularly fluid and delicate phase of evolution as a vehicle of
culture, breaking loose from the anachronism and the staidness of
literary expression as it had been shaped during the mid-century
Renaixença. What is more, the modernistes were, to a large degree
consciously, responsible for placing increased demands on the range
and ductility of Catalan as a literary medium, insofar as they were
enacting a far-reaching revision of the concept of Culture itself,
initiating in literature a surge onwards beyond the perceived
banalities of conventional romanticism and beyond the limitations or
literalness of naive realism. In this process, attuned at various points
to contemporary movements in those national literatures with which
Catalan aspired to be aligned, while the Word and the act of creation
48
Alexandre de Riquer
itself acquired transcendental status, some formal deficiencies of
written Catalan and the desiderata of its recent literary credentials
would inevitably be exposed. Seen in this light the literature of
Modernisme represents the overcoming of a double handicap,
impelled by the zeal of the movement and all its urges to 'stylise' its
new perceptions.
It is against this whole background that the literary activity of
Alexandre de Riquer needs to be considered. The basic identification
of the author with his native language, his roots in the Catalan
countryside, the ideological and artistic connotations of the 'literary
Catalanism' that modernista nationalism made such an inseparable
coupling, the characteristics—limitations and potential—of the
literary repertoire that Modernisme inherited and would renovate:
these are the parameters for situating Riquer's literary works in
relation to the biography and the artistic trajectory that we have
already outlined. A constant feature emerges which is the interrelation
between literary and visual modes of expression as cultivated by
Riquer. In detecting this as a hall-mark of his individual imagination
and creative temperament, a major element of his originality, we
perceive too something of its relevance within the aesthetics and the
literary programme of Modernisme as a total phenomenon.
Over twenty years separate the composition of Riquer's unpublished
Notas del alma (1875) from the publication in 1897 of Quan jo era
noy (When I was a Boy). It was with this work, (a collection of sixteen
prose pieces based on childhood reminiscences), that Riquer, now 41
years old, began a cycle of literary activity geared to other expressions
of his artistic temper. Rather than to seek for connections between
Notas del alma (written mainly in Castilian and deeply informed by
the naive poetics of Castilian romanticism) and Quan jo era noy, it
makes more sense to relate the latter work, as a fresh literary debut,
to the contemporary cultural scene in Catalonia wherein the artist
himself had become a considerable protagonist. For one thing,
unconditional use of Catalan as literary medium was by now an
automatic option for the cultural vanguard. A dominant subjectivism
and refinement of aesthetic sensation were, in general terms,
tendencies promoted, in precept and increasingly in literary
performance, by the Modernisme of the late 1890s. Contemporary
reviews of Quan jo era noy hopefully discerned in the work the
opening of new possibilities along such lines. It is interesting for us to
consider to what extent Riquer was in fact breaking new ground,
Riquer the Writer (Prose)
49
abreast of a potent change of sensibility, and to what extent he was
resorting to familiar, well-tried and even outmoded formulae from
within the local tradition.
The sixteen stories of Quan jo era noy were written mostly
between 1894 and 1896, but the book probably incorporates some
earlier material and certainly, as remarked above, some illustrations
dating from the 1880s. This itself indicates a basically transitional
(and opportunist) character, showing through an overall patterning
that was conceived, or at least presented, as a unified whole. Thus
the preface insists how the collection springs from an ideal, defined
as the 'giving of everything that lives deep in the heart, with the urge
to translate the sensations of the spirit', an ideal that corresponds to
'the vibrancy of [my] being, pining for things that are longed for and
have no form'. Unity is accordingly a function of the authenticity of
emotion deriving from 'the ideal that smiles upon me and constantly
plays upon the keys of my nerves [producing] a single note... born
as much in crude realism as, when recalled in hazy fantasies, it ends
in the shedding of a sentimental tear'.
The unstable nexus of 'nervousness-realism-fantasy-sentiment', a
first distillation of primary modernista aesthetics and the inherent
weakness of so many of its lesser products, articulates the internal
structuring of Quan jo era noy. It determines here a significant
diffraction of the simple coherence of the autobiographical design.
The narrator is not usually the main actor in the sixteen stories or
episodes, often appearing instead as witness to events experienced at
close range. The first-person narrative mode prevails, but we observe
that the narrator is frequently heard as part of a collective 'we' and
that in two of the most sensitive episodes—Antonieta, an evocation of
mental disturbance associated with adolescent loss of innocence, and
Com se'n van (Departing), the effects on a formerly callous father of
the death of his sickly daughter—an omniscient third-person form is
used. The single location of these episodes is the masia farmhouse in
La Segarra of Riquer's childhood (with the exception of Historieta
trista (Sad tale), whose ostensibly extraneous character was noted by
contemporary reviewers), and this unity is underscored by continuity
in the reappearance of several characters, involving a certain amount
of cross-reference between stories. It is as though a movement
towards a broad, overall patterning—in terms of a conventional
autobiography or of a novel in potential—has been checked or
fragmented. What matters are not the episodes themselves nor the
50
Alexandre de Riquer
concatenation of incidents as illustration of the development of the
narrator's experience, but rather the suggestive quality of his
recapturing of moment and mood, the effort itself of artistically
recreating a reality that is perceived as shifting and elusive.
Autobiography and the act of narration thus become 'pretexts' for
a more transcendental effort of imagination, as Riquer's preface
explains, again in terms of the ideal 'which makes me feel the urge to
fix, in order to rediscover and to relive them, these childhood
memories reworked in fantasy by the grown man'. The aesthetic
idealism of this is apparent, even when the writing itself is too flat to
conform to the motivation, and it is focused again in the final
episode, Després (Afterwards), whose main function is to describe the
underlying unity of the whole collection. Here, in what is perhaps the
most delicately composed of all the episodes, the adult narrator
returns to the abandoned masia in search of spiritual refreshment,
only to find the place depressingly empty and half-ruined. The theme
of Paradise Lost, the tension between reality and the inner world of
the creative imagination are thus directly evoked, and the book closes
in on itself as Després, thematically and chronologically, merges with
Riquer's preface.
The difficulty of giving a precise generic classification to Quan jo
era noy is not at all unusual when the book is viewed in its context.
Its hybrid character—autobiography, narration, lyricism and aesthetic
speculation—is in fact quite symptomatic of a phase of crisis,
experimentation and diverse reorientations in contemporary prosewriting in Catalan, intimately related, as Jordi Castellanos has
emphasised, to the central palpitations of Modernisme's aesthetic and
cultural concerns.
At the root of this phenomenon, as it affected narrative, was
dissatisfaction with the perceived superficiality of inherited concepts
of realism. The conventional novel, with its claims to comprehensive
objectivity in recreating the 'slice of life', went into recession.
Selection, concentration, emotiveness and sincerity, vibrations (a key
word) of poetic (or 'musical') evocation of glimpses of a reality now
discerned as fragmentary and subjectively relative: these were the
keynotes of a modified 'realism'—clearly related to derivations from
impressionism and symbolism in the visual arts—whose basic recipe
for performance was summed up in Raimon Casellas' formula of
'intensity of sentiment and of technique'. The short story, evocative
vignette or poetic prose understandably became the favoured units of
51
expression. The most chemically pure of modernista novels, Casellas'
own Els sots feréstecs (1901), was created out of a conscious effort to
expand 'intensity' into an ample and sustained image of life. Casellas
went several stages beyond the elaboration of a central point of
consciousness and gave a more complex gearing to the accumulation
and loose connection of 'intense' episodes, the two dominant
compositional features of Quan jo era noy. The similarity and the
progression are historically significant. Riquer's work is seen to
belong with a cluster of others from the late 1890s (Massó i Torrents'
Croquis pirinencs, M. Vayreda's Records de la darrera carlinada,
various works by Pons i Massaveu, Rusiñol between Oracions and El
poble gris, even occasional Records de noi by the old novelist Oller)
with several shared genetic traits, half an evolutionary stage from the
impressive boom in modernista fiction between 1901 and 1911.
The transitional character of Quan jo era noy now comes more
clearly into focus. What is also evident, though, in Riquer's and the
works associated with it, is a distinct primitiveness or reductionism
of material and of literary form. The new influences felt and the new
possibilities adumbrated there, while on the one hand they promoted
some dynamic experiments in stylisation, also contradictorily gave a
new lease on life to certain 'naive' prose models. The quest for
aesthetic purity, when Art-for-Art's-sake, Symbolist or Decadent
values were only part-assimilated, could legitimate a sort of recycling
of romantic costumisme, simple depiction of picturesque customs,
scenes and types from local life, rural or urban; unmediated
descriptivism could be passed off as suggestive mood-painting; the
cultivation of 'sentiment', the primacy of aesthetic feeling, could run
back into sentimentalism. Such was the attraction of romantic
antecedents, revitalised by the acknowledged 'neo-Romanticism' in
Modernisme, that they continued to permeate Catalan prose-writing
through into the twentieth century. Two interconnected aspects of
this literary current (reflecting also impediments in the objective
conditions of the contemporary literary language) are prominent in
Quan jo era noy. Both relate directly to Riquer's personal experience
and to his motivation in the turn to literary expression, in ways that
make this collection a quite markedly representative work.
First, the return to childhood offered perhaps the simplest formula
for providing thematic substance and pattern for embodiment of the
ideal. Innocence, purity and childlike simplicity become emblems of
the realm of the artistic spirit that, as Riquer's preface explains,
52
Alexandre de Riquer
'strives for beauty and more beauty, filled with sighs, with unfounded
sadness, with the despair of the child who in the dark night would
reach with tiny hands for the star shining in the sky'. Nostalgia, thus
inevitably sentimentalised, is artificially imbued with serious artistic
purpose. Associated with this was the surge of a sort of collective
atavism that was even more pervasive and culturally significant.
The emergence within Modernisme of a whole corpus of rural or
ruralist literature, regional in its themes and idyllic in tone, parochial
in outlook and ideologically conservative, is a distinctive feature of
the movement's repertoire, and one which is only at first sight
contradictory. The aesthetic justification for this kind of simplistic
nostalgia, already referred to, merged with several other interrelated
stimuli. Among these a strain of reaction against the squalor,
Philistinism and depersonalisation of industrial society was certainly
a component of modernista feeling, in which out-and-out reactionary
values combined wih a more sophisticated theory deriving from
Ruskin and Morris. In political terms, the discovery and affirmation
of Catalanism through community history, tradition and myth;
Catholicism as a bastion against the modern 'godless' state; notions
of 'roots' and of a communal spirit identified with land and
landscape: all encouraged promotion of rural images of an ideal
Catalonia within the ferment of nationalist energies that would only
find their definitive political channelling with the advent of Noucentisme
(a movement which absorbed the conservative import of ruralism
while berating all its rustic and romantic forms of expression).
Modernista ruralism also encompassed attitudes towards language
and expression, romantic associations of land(scape) and language
inherited from the Renaixença along with the idea of the Catalan
countryside as the repository of ethnic and linguistic purity.
Maragall's Eulogy of the Word and his theory of la paraula viva (the
living word), the ultimate modernista advocation of sincerity and
inspired spontaneity, was deeply impressed by this legacy. So too was
the writing of even those radically innovative prose-writers —
Casellas, Víctor Català, Prudenci Bertrana and, to a lesser extent,
Joaquim Ruyra—who supplied an inverted and neurotic version of
the rural idyll in exploring the limits of individual consciousness.
These writers and many other contemporaries figured, moreover, in
a literary census that was characterised, sociologically, by 'rural
exodus', a movement of aspiring artists into the metropolis, the
dynamic centre of the new nationalism. The turn of the century was
53
a time when all the conditions were propitious for the individual
writer to be faithful to his roots and, so to speak, to his idiolect.
This summary of a highly complex cultural circumstance supplies
a sort of identikit literary pattern to which Riquer's Quan jo era noy
conforms, in the broad outlines of assimilated convention and
contemporary relevance, and also in terms of the limitations of the
work's creative scope.
The society depicted in all these stories is Catholic-conservative,
rigidly hierarchical, patriarchal. The figure of the father, noble landowner and semi-feudal master, embodies stability and authority,
while the mother, the guardian angel of the children, represents the
warm protectiveness of a 'holy woman' whose very image 'dispels all
suffering'. It is an idealised, Utopian version of the Catalan
countryside, without conflicts between masters and servants, where
misery is accepted with resignation by the poorest and where the
masters' charity is the only remedy for those who suffer. Occasional
disturbances of this Order—the risks, incidents and minor crises
(natural and social) which form the subjects of the stories—tend
consistently to be resolved in variations on the 'happy ending'
wherein conventional religious moralism blends into social harmony.
Every modulation of lost time 'poetically' recovered—the work's
aesthetic pretext, as it is formulated between the preface and the
elegiac tone of the final piece—veers ultimately into line with an
ideological equivalent, the reactionary ruralism referred to above.
Quan jo era noy, in its confessional spirit, betrays this fundamental
contradiction between a would-be transcendental or emancipating
aestheticism and articulation of a set of values at odds with the social
dynamic of late-nineteenth-century Catalonia. Nowhere is this more
apparent than in the suggestively entitled Baf de ciutat (Stench of the
City) which, far from being a stylised Baudelairean plunge into the
abyss of the modern mind, represented in physical and moral
degradation, turns out to be a programmatic defence of pre-industrial
values. The young peasant who experiences the Hell of depravity of
modern Barcelona returns, corrupted and lawless, to the realm of
innocence of the masia, whence he is peremptorily expelled by one of
its virtuous guardians, the trusty farm overseer.
This fusion of subjective and social nostalgia is characteristic of
romantic costumisme (with its historical function of wistfully
recording the swathes cut by Progress), the genre to which Quan jo
era noy constantly harks back. It is what principally conditions the
54
Alexandre de Riquer
texture of Riquer's writing in this work, for all its pretensions
(occasionally realised) to a more sophisticated order of perception
and expression. The characterisation draws heavily on costumista
typology: El Manco (The Cripple) and L'Isidro, for example, in the
pieces bearing their names, remain firmly set in the mould of
representative, picturesque 'types', without 'roundness' or complexity.
The realism of the work is a quality that is determined principally by
its localism. The narrator's idealised vision is fixed upon and
materialised in a specific geographical location, the landscape of La
Segarra which is conscientiously depicted and made familiar in its
detail, the language of whose inhabitants is carefully reproduced in
dialogue and is incorporated into descriptions. In this procedure one
can detect both costumista strains and the ambition of the modernistes
to enrich the literary language with vocabulary sanctioned by its
(rural) authenticity and by its 'living' virtues. Certainly, one can feel
the effort made by the author to deploy a varied and precisely
detailed lexis in the depiction of scenes and moods (often contrasting
with slackness in other narrative effects), and it is in this visual,
concrete aspect that Riquer's prose shows its most individual and
creative stamp. It is, of course, the area where the competence of the
writer converges with that of the illustrator and painter. On the one
hand, the usual picturesque and pictorial idiom of costumisme— the
narrative unit conceived as quadre (picture) or estampa (print) made
up of verbal 'brush-strokes'—is fully called into play. El Manco, La
vetlla de Nadal (Christmas Night), L'Isidro and Lo llop (The Wolf),
for example, are readily interpreted as verbal equivalents of genre
painting. In closer focus, one is aware of a tight correlation betweeen
careful observation, with the arrangement of detail in the precision of
visual effect, and many of the accompanying drawings, as in this
description of a swallow (L'Oreneta):
Son cosset prim, bufó, ben estiradet, ab la cua d'estisora y el ventre
blanc, furgant dintre per netejar-lo de les runes que l vent de la
tardor y els freds de l'hivern hi havien arremolinat, fent caure
engrunes y fulles seques sobre les lloses del portal.
(Its trim little body, pretty and pert, with its scissor-tail and white
breast, poking away inside [the nest] to clear it of the odds and ends
swirled in by the autumn wind and winter cold, dropping bits and
dry leaves down on to the flagstones in the gateway.)
Later, when the bird is injured, the emotional tone is heightened by
the combination of visual and tactile sensation:
55
Son tremolor es va calmar a poc a poc, girava y regirava ls ulls,
obrint-los y tancant-los impregnats de sang, badant el bec, d'on
s'escapava una goteta vermella, aquietant-se, immovilisant-se, fins a
quedar tant fluixa que semblava que no tingués ossos.
(It gradually ceased trembling, its blood-filled eyes turned round
and round, opening and closing, its beak gaped open and from it
there escaped a tiny red drop; then it became calmer and still, until
it felt so soft that it seemed to have no bones.)
The writer is indeed capable of communicating some very delicate,
subtle effects of perception and sensation, as in this passage from La
Gavia (The Cage) where, in the blurred vision of drowsy observation,
the subjective (mental, suggestive) and the objective (connotative)
function of the words flow finely into each other:
La polcina de plata del raig de sol que hi entrava fins al cap de la
cambra m'endormisquejava suaument ab una ausencia de pensaments
y idees que no m deixava donar compte sinó de lo que ma retina
comunicava a mon cervell. M'ensopia ab un benestar indefinible, y
closes les parpelles, d'un vermell transparent, veya cambiants de
colors rojos y verds, que passaven al negre quan donava caparades.
Les mosques voleyaven dins del raig d'or descrivint angok aguts. Los
ulls, ab un esforç de celles, se m'obrien per tomar-sem a cloure a poc
a poc, fixant-me en l'ombra que reproduïa per terra l reixat
engrandit y en los esbatiments que projectaven los aucells dibuixant
siluetes fantàstiques.
Una abella pegava cops de cap per les parets y rondinava. El cervell,
enterbolit per la calor, sentia la meva respiració afanyosa, y sabia lo
que passava al voltant meu tant bé com ab los ulls oberts.
(The silvery haze of the sunbeam, shining in to the back of the
room, lulled me gently with an absence of thoughts and ideas
which made me unaware of anything except what my retina
transmitted to my brain. I was drowsing in an indefinable sense of
56
Alexandre de Riquer
well-being and, with my eyelids drooping, through a transparent
redness, I saw a shifting pattern of reds and greens, turning to black
as my head nodded.
In the golden beam the movement of flies described sharp angles.
My eyes, with an effort to raise my brow, opened only to close
slowly again as I gazed at the shadow formed on the ground by the
enlarged bars of the cage and at the fluttering projected in fantastic
silhouettes by the birds.
A bee was bumping against the wall and humming. My brain,
dulled by the heat, could hear my urgent breathing, and I could tell
what was going on around me as well as if my eyes were open.)
The spell here is broken by thought of the narrator's ailing mother,
whereupon the atmosphere and verbal texture of the piece descend
immediately to an altogether triter level.
The instance is one which brings into sharp focus both the virtues
and the limitations of Quan jo era noy. There is Riquer's profound
appreciation of the natural world—the wooded landscape, the birds
and animals associated with his own primitive self— communicated
with a sense of mysterious beauty, in moments when 'beauty' itself is
convincingly felt to be a function of the artist's intimate sensibility,
and of his creative effort to capture that ineffable relationship. The
motto enshrined in a symbolic drawing on the title page—'Cullirlo es
matarlo' (To pluck the flower is to kill it)—announces the aesthetic
dilemma. It indicates, too, how certain tendencies of Riquer's
imagination, that symbolist and Pre-Raphaelite influences would
reinforce, were inherent in his temperament and personal vision.
There is much in Quan jo era noy that recalls the nature poetry of
Riquer's companion Apel·les Mestres whose 'naturalism' was praised
by a contemporary reviewer because it stopped well short of the
brink of 'ugliness'. This is to be interpreted as the abyss of Decadent
experience, a domain which is timorously glimpsed then curtained
off in Antonieta and Com se'n van from Quan jo era noy. The
consequence is that pervading fayness which dominates
throughout. If on occasions,
as in the examples briefly
discussed, Riquer's writing
transcends banality it is in
details of perception that are
products of the artist's eye
57
expressed with a suggestiveness of language beyond the capacity of
the artist's hand.
Seen in perspective, Quan jo era noy stands as a literary debut that
looks both backwards and forwards, crossed with tensions that are
closely related to the author's temperament and to the cultural
circumstances of the work's production. Almost as if a necessary
stage of literary initiation had been undergone and a direction
established, Riquer in his next work would cut loose from many of
the bonds tying him to naive literary models (which themselves
emphasised a conventional cast of mind), and would intensify the
dimension of his writing which opened decisively upon a more
refined aestheticism in the form of symbolist prose-poetry. The
development occurred at a moment (1897-1899) when the artist's
creative élan and confidence were at their height, coinciding with the
great turn-of-the-century peak in modernista exuberance.
Crisantemes (Chrysanthemums), published in 1899, takes the form of
34 prose-poems introduced by a quotation from Barrés ('L'esprit
souffle où il veut, nul ne sait d'où il vient, où il va'), and by an unnumbered poem-prologue where we encounter again the spirit and
even the vocabulary of Riquer's earlier presentation of Quan jo era
noy. The 'dreams or fantasies... childhood memories reworked in
fancy by the grown man' become now 'dreams or fantasies, fables or
descriptions, strains of sentiment or of nostalgia'.
However, if the motivation of writing and the underlying artistic
function remain the same, the form of Crisantemes is markedly
different from and considerably more modern than that of Quan jo
era noy. What we have is a conscious and concerted exercise in prosepoetry as the mode was configured by the aesthetics of literary
Symbolism, a form which in Catalonia had been previously essayed
only by Santiago Rusiñol in Oracions (1897) and Els caminants de la
terra (1898). The poem in prose, which acquired major significance
in fin-de-siècle French literature, sprang from a revolt against the
perceived 'tyrannies' of conventional poetic form that might prevent
the poet from creating his own personal voice. It corresponds to that
very pronounced current of individualism which Catalan Modernisme
took from French Symbolism, at least as one of its principal sources.
The virtually simultaneous appearance, then, of three concentrated
58
Alexandre de Riquer
collections in this mode of writing (Rusiñol's works as mentioned,
Crisantemes itself, and Adrià Gual's Llibre d'hores, also published in
1899), just upon the turn of the century, clearly indicates the impact
of the fashion and its relevance to this specific phase of literary
evolution in Catalonia.
Indeed, the prose-poem in symbolist guise corresponded particularly
closely to the objective defined by Raimon Casellas as 'intensity of
sentiment and of technique'. Interestingly, the latter formula was
coined in connection with narrative, but it applied equally across the
range of production within the modernista programme of cultural
renewal. The new, cross-generic form of prose-poetry represented a
means of condensing the pure essentials of artistic emotion,
understood as the highest and most transcendental of values. For it is
precisely this quality of condensation and sublimation—literature's
'purest concentrate' as Huysmans saw it—that characterises the
form within its diverse possibilities of development. In fact a
distinction must be made here, in the observation that the type of
prose-poem adopted by the Catalan authors is not the seemingly
random 'illumination' inspired by Rimbaud or Mallarmé, but rather
the formal prose-poem which, with an overtly musical cast, obeys
and articulates a conscious effort of artistic organisation. The
analogy (recalling Pater's dictum about Art aspiring to the condition
of Music) helps to understand a basic difference of function between
two aesthetic attitudes, corresponding to two opposing metaphysical
outlooks. While the poetic prose of the 'illumination' springs from a
rejection of the settled order of things, from the effort to discover an
alternative 'order' (or to create it through the alchemy of words), the
'artistic' prose-poem, on the other hand, reposes on a feeling of
universal harmony and on a desire to participate in it. It is this latter
philosophy that unites Oracions, Llibre d'hores and Crisantemes,
within a broader cultural enterprise: the cognate urge to heighten
personal expressiveness merges with a movement to test the limits of
the common literary language.
In every sense, then, Crisantemes represents a significant aesthetic
advance with respect to Riquer's earlier prose. The narrative
pretence or 'pretexts' of Quan jo era noy are now reduced to barely
residual emblems: shreds of fable or exotic legened, parable, strain of
folk-song or fairy tale. The evocation of mood, elevated to the
category of religious transport, operates now through memory and
imagination virtually freed of the constraints of anecdote. In this
59
process there occurs, naturally, the final pruning out of those
antiquated literary models—the costumisme of childhood and idealised
setting, realist descriptivism—which are a kind of ballast in Quan jo
era noy.
Chronology, temporal development and precise historical reference
are eliminated from Crisantemes; geography all but disappears. Each
poem exists as a momentary revelation, as a self-contained and selfsufficient world closed in upon itself. The individual poem constitutes
a discrete unit of aesthetic concentration, a synthesised atomic
whole, where time is either absent or eternal. This tension, however,
between existence in time and the timelessness of art, the idea of the
eternal present, inspired particularly by musical analogies, led the
symbolist poets, and with them Riquer, to use procedures deriving
from versification in order to control the tempo of the prose, to
impose form and structure through rhythm.
The symbiosis prose-poetry-music is clearly a function of the
breakdown of generic categories, in the pursuit of stylistic renewal, so
characteristic of fin-de-siècle creativity. The essential strategy, in
imbuing prose-composition with the rhythm and sonority of music,
is through repetition of diverse sorts. Thus in Crisantemes the
echoing of single words or phrases is one of the most consistent
stylistic devices. A good example can be seen in poem VII, where
repetition of the 'poppies and white daisies' motif is designed to have a
haunting effect, worked into a verbal equivalent of a favourite image
from Riquer's graphic work of the period, that of flowing female hair
merging into widening ripples on water. As here, swirling and
intertwined patterns are deliberately evoked, notably in IV, XIII, XVI,
xvii, xxiii, etc.
Similar results are achieved elsewhere and overlaid with explicitly
musical elements (repetition of the familiar), in the form of strains
from popular folk-songs: XXIV glosses Plou, fa sol/les bruxes se
pentinan/plou i fa sol/les bruxes portan dol, while XXX makes a reprise
with La lluna, la bruna, vestida de dol, son pare la crida, sa mare la
vol. Beyond simple repetition we find delicate parallelisms of
construction: in IX it is sensuous mystery evoked through the
interplay of questioning and oneiric fantasy centred on floral
patterns:
iNo sabs ahont condueix la via d'aromers y llorers roses?... Apartat
de la via sembrada d'aromers y llorers... què'ls ulls de Pan brillan
entre'l fullatge.
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Alexandre de Riquer
(Do you not know whither leads the acacia and pink laurel
bordered path?... Leave the path sown with acacias and laurels...
for Pan's eyes gleam amid the foliage),
While in XXI it is the obsessively echoing repetition of the
interrogative:
Dígam, pálida nit ¿perquè en l'espay se prepara ta vinguda ab
reflexos d'incendi...?,
building to the climax,
¿Perquè dels cims més alts pujan girells de boyres, com si en la f osca,
terra y cel s'haguessin juntat en suprema abrassada.
(Tell me, pale night, why in the expanse your coming is prepared
with blazing reflections?... Why do whisps of mist rise from the
highest peaks, as though, in the dusk, earth and sky had joined in a
supreme embrace?)
Frequently the pattern is developed in three unfolding stages, in a
manner established in the opening piece: Somnis ò fantasíes...
Somniadores i fantasyaires, evolucions d'un cervell... Aplech de flors
gayre be tristes...
Cyclical structure, so appropriate a correlative of timelessness, of
eternal return, and thus so favoured by the Symbolists, is likewise
recurrent in Riquer who uses it to make the poetic idea coil in upon
itself, shaping the literary form to the sense of the inwards
imaginative spiral. Pieces IX, X and xviii exploit this technique to the
full, xviii, which is particularly opulent in language-texture, deploys
also the mirror-image effect:
'Oh, llochs divins d'Arcadia, prats hont floreix l'eterna primavera,
... Oh, prats florits! Oh, llochs divins d'Arcadia.!'
(Oh, divine places in Arcadia, meadows where Spring flowers
eternal... Oh, flowering meadows! Oh, divine places in Arcadia!)
This cyclical mirrored form within the individual piece recurs in
the broader pattern of the collection as a whole. Just as in the
example quoted above, where direct repetition is avoided, so on the
broader level Riquer introduces minor modification to the first
element so as not to fall into cold automation or facile symmetry.
The first two poems in the collection, I (on the theme of rainfall,
fertility and life), and II (crepuscular melancholy, evanescent visions
evoked through mood and memory), are picked up cross-wise by
XXXII and xxxiii (with the themes of night-scape contemplation and
61
fading strains of love-notes in poetry) and by the final piece xxxiv
which, through floral imagery, refers back to II but which also, for
further entwinement of the coda-effect, re-glosses the quotation from
Barrés. The whole collection is thus turned in upon itself—in a sort
of verbal equivalent of Art Nouveau's favourite swirling effect—
through contemplation of (and implied definition of) its own status
as poetic creation.
Within this frozen time-frame of the collection, we find themes
and motifs recurring between the separate compositions, further
strengthening the cyclical organisation. A significant pattern of
meaning emerges from various resonances of the solitary traveller's
panic fear and the fantastic chimerae aroused by dark woodland
scenes, 'the expansive cathedral where mystery flitters' (xxviii),
where 'Pan's eyes gleam amid the foliage' (ix), among 'strange
visions... memories or presentment of other lives' in 'nights whose
blackness invades all one's being, drowning the spirit in the darkness
of unconsciousness' (xxiv). It becomes clear that these insights and
imaginative visions represent the essential movement of aesthetic
emotions as an elevated mode of perception—from the mystery of
individual consciousness outwards, as the poem-prologue stresses—
and that poetic expression, as a mode of access to the great mysteries,
is the subject itself of the writing. This suggestion is reinforced by
frequent recurrence of themes of song, in the form of folk-song or the
natural song of the nightingale, the wind or the streams, hallowed
images of poetic communion with creation in the religion of Art.
This romantic legacy, mystically recharged by symbolist values, is
what so fully imbues the spirit of Cristantemes.
It is a spirit which can only be appreciated (however necessary it
might be to do this from a perspective of historical detachment) in
terms of confrontation with Absolutes as the aesthetic movement
conceived them. Where Quan jo era noy pointed towards a totally
subjective version of Nature and the Universe, the shift is consummated
in Crisantemes. Nature and the Universe are now the subjects of a
poetic vision which knows no boundary between the inner subjective
self and external reality. The circuit of idealism is closed. The
aesthetic world of Crisantemes wells out of the opening declaration
that the book's contents are 'all that lives within the self avid to take
external form'. Thus, as wilfully and consistently as any French
symbolist poet writing in the late 1890s, Riquer converts 'landscape'
into 'inscape'. The 'pathetic fallacy', now elevated to absolute
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Alexandre de Riquer
mystical status, alludes to the ineffable through a symbolic code of
universal images. The poet intuits equivalences between mood and
vision experienced in darkness or, more especially, in the half-light of
dawn and nightfall, when 'nothing is real'. The evanescent state of
mind is 'equated' with these privileged moments when the material
world is softened to become as though itself sentient. The haunting
suggestions of capvespre (twilight), day fading into night, correspond
to a spiritualisation of matter and of outline; synaesthesia floods into
the sensation of a mysterious, ineffable spirit-world, 'fading visions
like notes of an unknown song... everything hums a soft and muffled
tune... a legend of gallant knights with golden locks' all perceived
through an 'infinite tenderness... the bitter-sweet recall of a distant
kiss, undefinable and lost in the impenetrable depths of blurred
memories' (II). The illustration (like which other comparable
examples abound) is to us now perhaps less indicative of sensitivity
earnestly cultivated than of the tendency to slip into the fay
sentimentality and lushness that quickly took over, and disqualified,
this whole line of experiment and expression. Riquer, though, with
his contemporaries, deserves at least to have his intentions understood
in their context. The stock iconography can be re-viewed and can
have some of its original force restored if we look sympathetically at
the imaginative source out of which eventual cliche arose.
A good illustration can be poem X, devoted to one of the most
typical of symbolist-decadent images, the white lily as symbol of
purity and redemption. Again, as the visual image shades into
spiritual associations, the writing becomes suffused with a whole
mood of imanence or sublimation of the material world. The text
63
itself, here as throughout the collection, displays an equivalent of the
delicate craftmanship and retains some of the freshness more easily
appreciated still in the accompanying illustration and decoration.
The two effects are, of course, designed to be synaesthetically
unified. Even so, we can say that what rescues the words from
banality are the well-pitched cyclical movement, the forceful
antithesis—between the purity of the lily and the vileness of its
woodland-swamp surroundings—and the ingenuity of the comparison
with 'altarpiece virgins'.
This last detail identifies the rather conventional use of personification as a frequent device in Crisantemes for evoking the spiritual halo
of Nature: the storm 'intones the De profundis in the deserted
church' (xxv), the woods weep (xxviii) while in xxx twilight speaks
to a moon dressed in mourning and who, according to the folksong, is
courted by the dawn.
Just as the terms of the outer and the inner worlds are merged in
the vision of Crisantemes, in the spiritualisation of the physical, so
inversely is the indissoluble union expressed in material equivalences
given to the spiritual dimension, as in xxxiii, for example, where
'daydreams... like the vapour-clouds of a mystical censer poured out
from within my being'. Synaesthesia was the medium developed in
Symbolism for this function of the poetic sensibility, and Riquer
delights in exploring the multiple inflections offered. In viii a solitary
wild-flower on a rock at the ocean's edge 'sees only spreading before
it the endless Ocean of the inconsolable soul', with this figurative
reprise of the word that enforces the spiritual aura of the vision and
the symbolism of the flower as the poet's soul in solitary transport
before the 'incomparable poem of life'. A high point in this totally
subjective communion of the poetic emotion and the world of Nature
comes in xxvii where Riquer reworks the same drowsy floating on
the edge of conscious perception that we commented on earlier in
'The Cage' from Quan jo era noy:
Lulled by the scent of violets, the fresh draught from the cressladen brook could not stir me; my eye-lids slowly closed; a
contemplative and conscious drowsiness, a blissful calm, a complete
distancing from the external being marked by my body on the
patch of grass, prevented me from commanding the will to rise, and
I felt that I was alone on the earth, and that what strength I had
was wandering afar, searching out perfumes like the bees,
entranced by some indefinable dream.
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Alexandre de Riquer
The basic movement, which we have already identified with a
refined version of the pathetic fallacy, is one which discovers in the
spectacle of Nature and in external phenomena equivalences of
fleeting feelings and states of mind. A certain code of correspondence,
though, was as it were programmed into the poetics appropriated by
Riquer. There is a sort of symbolist conditioned reflex in his
insistence, for example, on night-time as evocation of sadness, death
and loss of the beloved in XIX ('It is always night in the heart where
hope is dead') and xx where an 'intense and impenetrable darkness...
beats down upon the soul'; and likewise, also in XX, in the association
of dead leaves with despair, 'the flurry of dead leaves swirled along by
the wind, now rotting in the water'.
This last observation highlights the essential artificiality of such
writing, where artistic emotion and the artifice which precariously
suggests it are elevated to pseudo-religious category. The poet's
intentions are thus defined, and the term 'artificial' must be applied
cautiously as a critical valuation. Even so, while Riquer in Crisantemes
supersedes some of the literary anachronism of Quan jo era noy, it is
also true that the new book lacks the spontaneity, innocence and
freshness of the first. The price to be paid was probably inevitable.
Riquer, the self-conscious and cultivated artist, who adopts the
posture, so fashionable in the cultural climate of his day, of
subordinating life to art, here runs into the contradiction of excessive
reliance on the currency value of those cultural references that feed
his imagination. This is particularly apparent in the later collections
of poetry, but already in Crisantemes the mannerisms are becoming
fixed. As well as the tendency to facile decorativism in the
deployment of so many motifs and cliches from the 'ready-made'
department of Symbolism, there is also the tendency towards
cultural pastiche (likewise shared by many of his contemporaries).
The book's diffuse eroticism is shot through with reminiscences of
clasical Greek culture; Pan, Daphnis and Chloë, and Venus being the
favourite mythical allusions. Similarly, the Middle Ages, evoked
through a Pre-Raphaelite literary and pictorial lens, are another facet
of the mythology of this culture-based fantasy world. Out of the
Parnasse and fin-de-siècle spiritualism Riquer also extracts a fashionable
strain of Orientalism, invoking the ancient Indian religions with
symbolic references to Indra, the land of eternal repose (xxix), to the
sacred lotus of the Apsaras (xxi) or to the literary topos of the Virgins
of Carthage, worshippers of the pale Goddess Thanit, the moon
(XXX).
65
Such 'literariness', which endows the writing with the equivalent
preciousness of the exquisite art-object but which inclines towards
mere affectation, is redeemed, nevertheless, through being matched
and balanced by other notes which are more convincingly internalised
and personal to Riquer. In particular, recurrent allusions to song,
and more specifically to Catalan folk-song, have a deep and true
resonance. On the one hand they are attuned, historically, to
patriotic myths and themes of Volkgeist in the quest for collective
identity, central concerns in Modernisme's
ideological and political ferment. This is
virtually explicit in xiii, where the talismanic
flute discovered by a shepherd evokes 'l'esperit
de pàtria', the homeland spirit and the last of
the fairies. On the other hand also, strains of
these same folksongs are expressive of the
purest poetic instinct and of deeply intimate
longings. In n and in xii the 'unknown song' and the 'forgotten song'
spontaneously suggest themes of fusion, a longed-for spiritual union,
a desire for communion with the mysteries of the spirit-world,
culminating in the reprise of xxxiv, where themes of poetry and
divine inspiration merge in the impotent nostalgia of the poet's
struggle to express the ineffable.
Some critics have loosely categorised Cristantemes as a work of
Decadence while others have insisted strongly on this affiliation.
Both visions require some clarification, especially the latter which
appears to focus too exclusively on the title of the collection at the
same time as it over-emphasises the theme of Death in the writing
itself. It is to be remarked in the first place that chrysanthemums are
as much a decorative element of Art Nouveau and the japoniste style
as they are a decadentist emblem. Moreover the theme of Death in
Crisantemes is more ambiguous than the Decadent label would
imply: morbidity and the delectatio morosa are in tension with other
forces and moods throughout the book, and the tone which
ultimately prevails is one of transcendence. This needs to be
understood in relation to the basic conflict between Decadentism and
Vitalism that was a principal dynamo of cultural theorisation and
productivity in Catalonia over the turn of the century. Indeed, the
issues involved here, and the ultimate resolution of the tension in
favour of vitalist tendencies, where what shaped and directed the art
and ideology of Modernisme in its final phase, as the work of Marfany
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Alexandre de Riquer
and Castellanos has convincingly demonstrated. In the preceding
period just upon the turn of the century, the moment to which
Crisantemes belongs, the two forces remained in more equal
contention, their interplay was itself a focus of creative energy, and,
furthermore, as Castellanos observes, the vitalist and the decadentist
mode are often difficult to separate as each tended to use the same
imagery and vocabulary.
It is precisely in this context and in these terms that Crisantemes
must be interpreted. Death and morbidity certainly figure in
Riquer's thematic palette (being central in certain pieces: IX, XX,
xxvi), and we recognise the characteristic decadent impulse to peer
into the abyss, to speculate at this the most extreme limit of
consciousness. But neither is Death triumphant not is decadent
languour the prevalent mood. On the contrary, what is more
emphasised is the struggle itself, the tensions —ambiguous,
contradictory, paradoxical—, between Life and Death. Poem XXVI is
absolutely paradigmatic in this sense, for it plays precisely upon the
essential interdependence of the two: when the end of Death is
decreed the populace become bored with 'life without end', frustrated
that there can be no prospect of 'new life', and end up praying for
Death to be restored; just as there can be no Death without previous
Life so a kind of obverse is demonstrated in this telling little
parable.
A similar ambiguity or balance of forces is encountered too in the
key poem XII where the familiar decadentist motif of nostalgia for lost
youth and for pure ideals that have crumbled is turned into the
powerful affirmation that 'lo recordar és viure', to remember is to
live. It is in this same spirit that the poet resolutely rejects the
charms of the 'lascivious bacchante, obscene courtesane, barren
decadent woman of the fin de siècle' (XXII). The use of the term
'decadent' (its only occurrence in the volume) and the posture
towards the 'living image of refined vice' are both clearly deliberate,
set also firmly within the wider cultural debate mentioned above.
The rejection of the bacchante derives on the one hand from the
strong Catholicism that Riquer never abandoned, but it can also be
felt that there is at work an equally strong impulse coming less from
moral scruples than from a vital, or vitalist, imperative: 'the breast,
which in other women is a fount of life, in her is a source of death'.
And beyond this is that pseudo-religious or mystical urge to
transcend death, to contact the 'beyond' in states of mind or
67
inspiration through which the poet can melt into the Creation.
It is in this sense that Riquer's Catholicism, in the opulent version
cultivated by a branch of fin-de-siècle aestheticism, merges with the
more secular, culture-based mysticism in a mix which characterises
the writer's individual response to contemporary stimuli, and his
individual literary voice. His Vitalism is inseparable from the
mystical cult of Nature and of Beauty, in terms which are neither
purely humanist nor which exclude the Christian deity. The
interplay of these feelings is at the centre of the key imagery in
Crisantemes. In literary terms one can talk of a sensibility which is as
close to the sort of Pantheism expressed in the nature poetry of Joan
Maragall as it is to Baudelaire's searching 'correspondences'. This is
summed up in the telling section of xxviii, where Riquer's favourite
woodland motif strikes the chord in which all these notes are
discernible: 'The forest, that expansive cathedral in which mystery
flutters, raises its voice in a plaintive chord as though of a distant
organ'.
Crisantemes stands, then, as one of the most remarkable cases of
fully-fledged Symbolist prose-poetry within Catalan Modernisme. In
the light of our discussion it is clearly insufficient to clasify the text
as an exercise in Pre-Raphaelite writing, on the basis of the
occasional 'Rossettian' vignette, the stylised medievalism or the
preference for certain images like swans, fountains, the lily and the
water-lily, etc. The point is that this is an iconography and idiom
common to the whole of European Symbolism, and it is in this much
wider category that Crisantemes must be viewed. If a single direct
influence is to be ascribed then it is surely that of French Symbolism,
as the epigraph from Barrés announces, and as is expressed in the
work's general consonance with the spirit of Baudelaire's 'La
modernité, c'est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de
l'art, dont l'autre moitié est l'éternel et l'immuable'.
The particular significance of Crisantemes, though, is centred on
the extent to which Riquer makes his own and incorporates into the
repertoire of Catalan the expressive possibilities and the sensibility
embodied in the Symbolist enterprise. Evidence of this is to be found,
on the broadest level, in the way in which so many motifs and images
from Cristantemes make their way subsequently into that prolific
flowering of modernista writing that surged up in the first decade of
the new century. On the one hand, 'Pan's eyes gleaming amid the
foliage' (ix) signals the mood of Víctor Català's Solitud and the wave
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Alexandre de Riquer
of anti-idyllic ruralism climaxing in that novel, while on another
plane the theme of XV, where the poet's distraction in fantasy is
confronted with human tragedy, brings to the surface a contradiction
inherent in underlying bearings of Modernisme and makes explicit
the conclusion to which so much modernista writing tends: 'from
limitless space, the poet was brought back down to earth, to the
brutal earth of a reality which shatters illusion'. These and numerous
other 'intertextual' reverberations indicate the relevance of Crisantemes
to its cultural moment and to the whole process of literary continuity.
On the level of personal expression, moreover, Crisantemes is
representative also insofar as it bodies forth the aestheticism and artfetichism which pervaded modernista creativity. At the heart of the
collection lies that urge to fix the fleeting relationship between the
sensitive imagination and the mystery of Nature, to transcribe the
priviliged moment in which true insight and true self-fulfilment are
enshrined, when inspired poetic utterance becomes spiritual plenitude,
in the process which the final piece describes:
L'esprit souffle où il veut, nul ne sait d'oú il vient, ou il va: beauty
imposes itself, and the poet lost in the cool shade of the woodland
branches, in his solitude, free from imprisoning gazes, deep in the
forest and far from anyone to hear him, possessed by the feverish
urge to outpour his feelings, with an ample gesture and loving voice
breaks forth in the stanza which tremulously springs out to his
lips...
Behind the exaggerated posture and rhetoric there lies a powerful
and engaging idealism whose historical impact was, and remains,
conspicuous. In purely literary terms we perceive in this poem XXXIV
a kind of personal poetics containing profound affinities with
Maragall's influential theory of the Living Word. The question of
influence is less important here than the affinities themselves and
their implications. We see Riquer as participating fully in the total,
organic process of a literary movement in the fullest sense of
word.
It is clear from the foregoing that it is as poetry rather than as
narrative that Crisantemes must be described, and moreover that it is
to the central tradition of modernista poetry that the affiliation
relates. Just as for Maragall and for the phase of writing that his
influence inspired, sponanteity, the truthfulness of the poet to his
own sensibility, is the paramount value, so for Riquer the same quest
is exalted. In the opening preface he presents a metaphor of a
69
'murmuring spout of the purest water' as quintessence of poetry, the
source whose perfume, clarity, immediacy and primal authenticity
the poet would imitate in his own outpourings. Emblems of poetry,
then, open and close Crisantemes, and the language of the collection
is marked throughout with a texture whose rhythms and deliberate
musicality disclose a sort of latent prosody. Complementing the
repititions and parallelisms already mentioned, we detect some
emergent metrical patterns which bear, as one contemporary critic
immediately observed, a distinct preference for the hendecasyllable.
Versification is, as it were, embedded in the very fabric of Crisantemes
and the work itself, as a stage in a personal literary evolution, might
be seen to point towards a transition into verse proper.
Indeed, with a certain natural logic, Riquer returned to verse
writing, the Symbolist experience now assimilated, with the publication
in 1902 of Anyoranses (Nostalgic Reminiscences). In one sense this
can be seen as a progressive development, the necessary step on
beyond the limits of poetic prose reached in Crisantemes. In another
sense, however, and seen in full perspective, the movement was more
regressive than 'modernising'. The return to poetry, as we shall see,
entailed a return to tradition, to formal stereotype and the adaptation
of certain Classicism, all of which revealed the limitations of
Riquer's literary capacity. From the perspective of Anyoranses and
the ensuing collection of sonnets (Aplech de Sonets) indeed, it can be
seen that with Crisantemes Riquer had reached the peak of his own
creative potential in literature and the point of his greatest relevance
to the wider cultural scene. By the time a comparable peak of
expressiveness and personal authenticity was regained, now in verse,
with the ambitious Poema del Bosch published in 1910, the relevance
was being severely placed in question.
CHAPTER IV
RIQUER THE POET
Riquer lost his wife, Dolors Palau (Lolita), in the
same year that Crisantemes was published. The
tragedy transformed his life and his inspiration as a
writer. Personal factors merged with latent directions
in his literary production up to this point to make
him now a poet devoted essentially to evoking the
presence of the lost beloved, in formal poetry where
melancholia and distress are mingled with the hope
of being reunited with her in the after-life, in a transcendental
'otherwordly' love.
In discussing the prose works of Riquer we have found it necessary
to qualify the extent of his direct affinities with Pre-Raphaelite
models. At this point, however, the affiliation can be seen to be real,
both thematically and in terms of specific formal influence. The
inspiration for the new cycle of literary production was the work of
the English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, especially The Blessed
Damozel, at only one remove from a common source in the poetry of
the venerated Dante Alighieri. In our Chapter II we observed how, at
the time of composing Anyoranses, Riquer and Manuel de Montoliu
(the translator of La Vita Nuova into Catalan) were holding readings
and commentaries on The Divine Comedy in the former's studio.
These circumstances reverberate in the dedication of Anyoranses to
'the late lamented wife...' and in the opening epigraph taken from
stanza xxxiii of the Vita Nuova.
Riquer's collection comprises an introductory sonnet and 62
poems distinguished by an extraordinary variety of verse-form and
rhythmical pattern. This formal complexity, the details of which
need not concern us here, is a primary indication of the meticulous
seriousness with which Riquer approached the poetic craft, with
something of the draftsman's attention to detail: properties which
could and did, however, impede flow and the spontaneous sincerity
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Alexandre de Riquer
which several poems claim as their moving force. Thematically, as
Riquer's modern commentators have stressed, these poems show
obvious parallels with the poetry of Rossetti, that 'modern, luminous
Dante' as Riquer himself later called him. For McCarthy 'Anyoranses
explores the possibility of a Rossettian transcendental love, an
earthly love wearing a spiritual halo'. Castellanos, on the other hand,
misses the predominant sensuality and morbidity of the English poet,
considering that Riquer takes the emotional cliches of Pre-Raphaelism
and returns them to their origins in the medieval spirituality of
Dante Alighieri. The point is surely, though, that the Catalan poet
was drinking from dual, intercommunicating sources. The PreRaphaelite example, even if only part-assimilated, was clearly a
direct stimulus to Riquer, as several literal echoes of Rossetti in
Anyoranses confirm. His description of his beloved, for example:
per I'ampla roba de dalt baix oberta
ofrena d'armonia
com la que fa la flor y a Deu envia
ingènuament oferta. (Poem XXXVIII)
(... her ample dress, opened from top to bottom, offering of
harmony like that made by the flower and sent to God, ingenuously
offered.)
clearly recalls the stanza from The Blessed Damozel:
Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem
No wrought flowers did adorn,
But a white rose of Mary's gift,
For service meetly worn.
In a short story, 'The King of the Poplars', written at the same
time as Anyoranses, Riquer evoked a similar vision with an explicit
mingling of his two literary sources, the 'Blessed Damozel' and the
Beata Beatrix of Dante. Rossetti it was, though, who supplied most
fuel to Riquer's visual imagination. The common desire to relive
earthly love in the after-life is expressed in the image, from The
Blessed Damozel, of the poet and his beloved rising one day
... hand in hand,
To him round whom all souls
Kneel...
echoing in Riquer's vision of being led by his beatified love
Riquer the Poet
Fins al trono del Altíssim
me farà de guia sant
y allí, una llàgrima seva
redimirà mos pecats. (Poem VI)
(To the throne of the Almighty, leading me as a holy guide, where a
tear will redeem my sins.)
Nonetheless, Anyoranses is to be
read as something more than a
superficial imitation of certain
aspects of Rossetti's poetry. The
collection was born out of tragedy,
and out of the urge to find solace
and salvation through writing.
The movement which transforms
distress into lyric expression
creates a note of intense feeling,
through all the artifice and decoration, as was recognised by none
less than Maragall, the main flagbearer of emotional and expressive
spontaneity in poetry. Maragall's
review of Anyoranses, alluding to
the presence of Dante, insisted on
the simplicity and authenticity of
certain poems which he saw as
embodying his own particular
concept of 'pure poetry':
Occasionally the literary
apparel is torn by the vivacious memory of conjugal
happiness, by the sudden
sharpening of pain, by a
vision, almost a momentary
hallucination, and then the
palpitation swells forth in
the purest nakedness of
poetry... The tenderness of
the wonderfully living vision
interrupts the tears: that is
real poetry.
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Alexandre de Riquer
Maragall quotes various instances of the 'pure' poetic moments he
found in Anyoranses, all of which highlight the ultimate, confessional
tone of the collection, like this one evoking memory and solitude in
the empty home:
El meu tremolor no'l sents?
Dintre l'ample menjador
Fins esbatego de dents,
La nit fa por,
No hi ha ningú
Y penso en tu. (Poem xxv)
(Do you not hear me tremble? In the spacious dining room I cannot
stop my teeth from chattering. The night is fearsome. There is noone here and I am thinking of you.)
Certainly, the qualities admired by Maragall are those which echo
not only the Pre-Raphaelite imagination but also, more generally,
symbolist characteristics, especially the confluence of mysticism and
sensuality. The atmosphere, heavily laden with perfumes of incense
and myrrh and bathed in celestial music, is impregnated with a
feeling closely related to the symbolist sensibility and which is
expressed preferentially through effects of synaesthesia, as, for
example, when Riquer envisages the perfect union of the lovers:
fugint ab Ella sense dexarnos may
com una nota armònica que oneja
sospesa en l'ample espay. (Poem XIX)
(fleeing with her never to be parted, like a harmonious note that
ripples hanging in the breadths of space.)
The point is that it is wrong to squeeze the poet Riquer into an
exclusively Pre-Raphaelite dress that does not quite fit; his PreRaphaelism, like that of other contemporary Catalan writers, simply
could not be identical to the original British version. On the one
hand, the influence of French Symbolism, as we have remarked here
and in connection with the prose, supplied consistent variations on
complementary themes. It is true, moreover, that Catalan modernista
poetry—given the limitations of context and tradition—rarely attains
the linguistic refinement or the philosophical depth of the best PreRaphaelite poetry in English. Nor should it be a question here of
viewing Riquer's poetry purely in comparative terms and in terms of
the diverse influences received by Catalan Modernisme. The poet's
individual circumstances, temperament and voice are considerable
Riquer the Poet
75
factors, as is also the strength of local influences.
Riquer's Catholicism is strongly felt in Anyoranses, conditioning
an image of Dolors in which maternity strongly overrides sexuality,
placing her in a position quite removed from the sensuous personality
of Rossetti's chosen one:
Es un goig lo mirarte, bella fotografia
ahont de mare'l gesto noblement irradia (Poem LIV)
(It is a delight to look at you, beautiful photograph in which the
mother's gesture shines forth nobly)
(suggesting, incidentally, an insight into Maragall's admiration for
precisely this 'domestic' aspect of the book.) Likewise, the recurrent
floral motifs throughout Anyoranses are more closely related to the
mystical, Marian lyrics of the priest-poet Jacint Verdaguer than to
any other literary influence. Castellanos highlights this telling
example, in which echoes of Verdaguer's Flors de Maria and other
poems are unmistakable:
Perfum de rosa, flor de viola,
poncella vera del roserar,
llàgrima d'alba, sospir que vola;
l'amor que et porto m'ha de matar! (Poem v)
(Rose perfume, violet flower, true bud of the rose tree, dawn tear,
fleeting sigh; my love for you will surely kill me!)
The most constant note in all Riquer's production, his love of and
sensitive eye for Nature, is retained in Anyoranses, constituting
another facet of his own personal stamp in the poetry. While Nature
is here by no means the protagonist—the memory of Dolors is
obsessively central—it remains ever present in Riquer's vision, as it
was in Crisantemes. Here it is the privileged scenario of lost love and
happiness, in nostalgic evocations of walks together in the woods,
and it is the constant physical reminder of eternity, perpetually
reborn through the cycle of the seasons—in stark contrast with the
abruptness of bereavement— felt all the more poignantly through the
sense of her absence. Thus we encounter again this most personal
and distinctive trait of Riquer's production, both as writer and as
draftsman, which underwrites his claim to authentic originality,
however great the extent of his debt to outside influence. No doubt
the writings of Ruskin confirmed the ideas of the Catalan artist in his
maturity, and comforted him in his distress, but his feeling for
Nature went further back and deeper in his experience than any
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Alexandre de Riquer
reading of the English aesthete; its origins were in the upbringing
and in the formation of his personality in the Paradise Lost of
Bassols, the recreation of which in Quan jo era noy contained already
the genetic plan of Riquer's creations in words.
Personal circumstances determined the need and the cultural
climate supplied the terms and
justification for Riquer to develop
as a poet. Anyoranses, as we
have seen, for all its shortcomings,
represents much more than a
passing phase of private selfindulgence. Rather is it a quite
mature engagement with poetic
convention and expression,
showing the profile of a poetic
personality capable of further
consolidation. This is confirmed
by the trajectory of Riquer's
subsequent literary production.
Although not published until
1977 (edited by M.A. Cerdà in
the commemorative volume
Alexandre de Riquer. L'home,
l'artista, el poeta), the collection
Petons (Kisses) can with some
accuracy be dated 1903. It
stands as a sequel to Anyoranses,
in the form of a fully-worked
and coherently structured cycle
of poems devoted to the theme of literary recreation of lost love, a
theme now strengthened by reinforcement of the traditional and
classical framework in which the process is enacted. Some of the
engravings done to illustrate this book were shown by Riquer at the
1906 National Fine-Arts Exhibition in Madrid. This detail, as well as
helping to date Petons, is further indication of the artistic seriousness
with which the collection was composed and of the state of relative
completeness in which publication was abandoned. (Indeed, corrected
proofs of the whole set were discovered by E. Trenc in 1975.)
There are two reasons to explain plausibly why Petons was not
Riquer the Poet
77
published in its day. The first, which supplies even more firmness
about the date of composition, is that nine poems from Petons appear
in the final part (Un poema d'Amor) of the longer collection that
Riquer published in 1906 (on which work is known to have been
virtually completed, though, by 1903). The former work, then,
appears to have been a sort of rehearsal for the latter, abandoned
when Poema d'Amor acquired definitive shape. The other reason for
the ostensibly abrupt ditching of Petons is that of an apparent
embarrassment on the poet's part at the intimate and erotic note in
many of the poems. The gradual recovery from immediate grief and
also possibly changes occurring in the moral climate of the times,
with the beginning of Noucentisme's 'conservative backlash', would
account for Riquer's sensitivity on this score and for the act of selfcensorship that is openly prefigured in one of the poems of Petons:
després estriparem los versos ab que cantes
l'interna poesia del Talem nupcial,
Que n'ha de fe'l terrer de com granen les plantes? (Poem XXIV)
(Afterwards we shall tear up the lines with which you sing the
inner poetry of the marriage bed. How is the ground to be blamed
for seeds the plants give?)
In its published form Petons comprises two parts: a first section of
24 anacreontic lyrics, preceded by an introduction where the poet, in
the setting of classical idylls, combines his favourite topics of Nature
and the loved one; then a second part of seven poems followed by a
concluding sonnet which offers a reprise of the opening poem in a
kind of epitaph to the figure of the woman who inspired the whole
cycle.
Petons appears thus as a more carefully and coherently structured
ensemble than Anyoranses or even Crisantemes. Life and Death are
contrasted between the two parts, in the first of which Dolors is
celebrated as a living presence, while in the second her death and
absence are lamented. The first 24 poems are presided over by the
spirit of classicism, each of them being introduced by a translated
fragment from Theocritus, Vergil, Anacreon, Sapho or Propertius.
These are the poet's authorities for the vitalistic pantheism and the
mood of exalted idealism in which experiences are clothed. Similar
motifs were visible in Crisantemes, but here they are more consistently
applied and modulated. In the second part, on the other hand, the
inspiration and authority become once again the idealised late
Middle Ages incarnate in Dante and in the Petrarch of In morte di
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Alexandre de Riquer
Laura, merging with the Pre-Raphaelite version deriving from D.G.
Rossetti. The movement from vitalist excitement and optimistic
pantheism through to despair is thus given a universal frame of
literary reference, representing the opposing but complementary
models that fed Riquer's imagination. Metrical patterns are likewise
more tightly controlled than in Anyoranses and a preference for
'classical' forms begins to be seen in Petons, with seven sonnets and
five silvas out of a total 33 poems. The firming of this tendency would
occur in the Aplech de sonets (1906), Riquer's next published book of
poetry, on which he was already working.
One of the remarkable things about Petons (and, as suggested, one
cause of the author's second thoughts about publication) is the
attention paid to the physical basis of idealised erotic experience.
What in Crisantemes is implied in 'the eyes of Pan gleaming amid the
undergrowth' and what in Anyoranses is insinuated then idealistically
sublimated, is here explicitly presented. The erotic nature of the twosome's night walks in the woods puts into the background the purely
decorative motifs in these two examples:
He vist dessota'l bosch il·luminarse
l'esplendor de ton pit;
sota teu han cruixit
coroles y poncells al vinclarse. (Poem V)
(I have seen under the woodland canopy the splendid brilliance of
your breast; flower-heads and buds rustled as they were bent
beneath you.)
S'enfonsa lo teu cos al tou de l'herba
y ta forma es superba
com armonia de bellesa ardida
tota esclatant de vida;
honora als deus y generosa invita:
Salut a l'Afrodita! (Poem VII)
(Your body sinks into the softness of the grass and your form is as
proud and fine as a harmony of blazing beauty all bursting with
life; it does honour to the gods and offers a generous invitation:
Hail to Aphrodite!)
Twilight—now translated out of and virtually freed of decadent
connotations—is the moment when the amorous union is fulfilled,
when, as night falls, the body of the beloved assumes a magical aura,
a favourite image in several of Riquer's etchings:
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79
y en claror difusa, transparent, voluptuosa,
ondular veig la curva movedissa y hermosa
de ma Vida qu'espera y vetlla enamorada. (Poem I: xiii)
(And in the diffuse light, transparent and voluptuous, I see in
sinuous dance the shimmering, beautiful curved form of my Life,
waiting and watching in love.)
The theme of kisses, which occurs in almost every poem of this
first part, symbolises the vital plenitude of the amorous union, a
physical union which becomes exalted into something divine and
eternal:
y el f erm petó rebut y retornat,
la fogarada ardenta que devora
conjunció de l'amada y del amat
ansiosos de besarse,
dues vides qu'esclaten llavi enfora
y vibran al toparse. (Poem I: vii)
(the firm kiss received and returned, the burning fire which
consumes the joining of lover and beloved in their urge to kiss, two
lives bursting out through the lips and vibrating as they touch.)
These images of fire and of the flame of love, associated with kisses,
recall Dante's fiamma and Rossetti's reworking of the motif. Even so,
that distance between Riquer and the English Pre-Raphaelite which
above we noticed in connection with the question of maternity, is
still maintained. What we find in Petons, though, is now a more
sensual concept of motherhood as the bodily fulfilment of a bodily
relationship, as in this picture of the child sleeping at the mother's
breast:
Li sonrius engelosida
y l'enclous ab dolsa amor
en ton si qu'es font de vida,
y l'infant fa la dormida
al compàs que bat ton cor. (Poem I: xx)
(You smile on him jealously and enwrap him in sweet love at your
breast which is the fount of life, and the child slumbers to the
beating of your heart.)
The second part of Petons stands in complete contrast, as we have
remarked, to such affirmations of mystical and exuberant vitalism.
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The poet now expresses his human suffering as acute misfortune
succeeds happiness. The section opens with the stark vision of the
motionless corpse:
Fixa la tinch la darrera
visió de ton cos hermós,
del teu cos tot groch y palit,
fret ab la fret de la mort,
la teva cara marcida
per lo trapàs del dolor. (II: i)
(Imprinted in my mind is the last vision of your lovely body, your
body all yellow and pale, cold with the coldness of death, your face
wizened with the last passage through pain.)
When, however, she is subsequently seen as 'sanctified, beautified
and ennobled in death' we seem to sense grief and emotion tailing off
into triteness and cloying religiosity. Petons, despite the allusions to
Dante and Rossetti, does not contemplate the possibility of a
transcendental love and reunion beyond the grave, and this appears
as one of the imaginative weaknesses of the collection, in comparison
both with Anyoranses and the later collection. There is a resulting
hollowness or futility, despite the undoubted strength of feeling, in
the repeated statements of loss and grief, emphasised in this example
in the definitive force of the verbs:
Los seus petons qu'han mon sense esperança
de que tomin may més!
es lo meu cor glatintse d'anyorança
perquè Ella ja no hi es! (II: vii)
(Her kisses that have died with no hope of their return! It is my
heart aching with longing because she is no longer there!)
Petons, then, stands as a significant stage in Riquer's poetic
production, a work which might have achieved viability if its positive
features had not been subsumed in the subsequent collection and
part of its weakness overcome there.
The three-part collection Aplech de sonets, Les cullites, Un poema
d'Amor was published in 1906, the last title, dated 1903, being the
earliest chronologically. Un poema d'Amor, as already suggested, was
a sort of culmination of a whole first cycle of Riquer's poetry
represented by Anyoranses and Petons. Nine poems from the latter,
unpublished collection, five of them sonnets, reappear, reworked, in
Un poema d'Amor, which is itself divided into three sections: 'Ver
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81
sacrum', 'Midday Sun' and 'Sunset', each introduced by a quotation
from Sapho, Vergil and Petrarch respectively. The Life-Death,
optimism-pessimism movement of Petons is reproduced, but with
some refinement and a detectable increase in poetic self-consciousness.
The eight sonnets of 'Ver sacrum' celebrate springtime, the passing
of winter and the onset of new life and Love. In the atmosphere of
vital fecundity the loved one appears in a decadent-symbolist guise so
favoured in modernista iconography, that of the virginal adolescent
on the brink of womanhood:
ta ingènua positura humil, de col·legiala
vestida ab l'esclavina posada per distreure
el jove brotonar de florida primala. (Un poema d'Amor, I)
(your ingenuous, humble schoolgirl posture, clad in the wraparound cape to cover the youthful swell of your first flowering.)
As in Riquer's other writing and graphic work, floral imagery has
here a central symbolic and decorative role. From the conventional
association of flowers with springtime and love, the motif is extended
to make the beloved herself 'the flower which captivates my
quivering soul' (iv), the half-opening bud which exudes a heady
perfume, the 'spring-like perfume' (vii) that is her whole being.
From this unoriginal nexus of ideas (Spring, Life, Love) centred
on the fay sensuality of the burgeoning adolescent figure, as sterile in
its emotional effect as the most facile of Art Nouveau female forms,
we pass in 'Midday Sun' to sumertime plenitude of physical and
spiritual love, to the ecstasy of emotional union in oneness with
Nature. The emotion here seems less stereotyped, an impression
explained perhaps by the fact that eight of the nine poems salvaged
from Petons are concentrated in this section (comprising 20 sonnets
in all), retaining thus a link with Riquer's original inspiration and
movement of feeling. The theme of kissing, now embellished and
worked into the bucolic setting that the Vergilian epigraph announces,
harks back now even further to intimate childhood memories of
Bassols:
Allí, en l'intimitat d'un bell boscatge,
vora la llar del foch d'antich usatge,
madona mia, m'hi voldràs seguir? (Un poema d'Amor, x)
(Thither, in the intimacy of a lovely glade, by the ancestral fireside,
madonna of mine, will you follow me?)
This section likewise, despite obvious differences of literary posture,
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contains echoes from back beyond Petons, as in this reminiscence of
the 'last fairy' of Crisantemes, identified now with the beloved:
Entre les flors reposa quieta, destrenada;
el bosch ha retrobat a sa perduda fada. (xiii)
(Among the flowers she rests in tranquil repose, her hair unfastened;
the woodland has rediscovered its lost fairy.)
Love's plenitude is embodied in maternity, in that process
paralleled with Nature's seasonal vegetation and fruition, a major
theme, it must be recalled, in Riquer's own pictorial work and that of
symbolist artists in general. If the literary version, at least in Riquer's
hands, sounds now thin, mannered and unconvincing in comparison
with its visual equivalents, to the personal and contextual factors
that would explain this (the limitations of Riquer's verbal talents,
deficiencies of the local tradition, linguistic instability) must be
added the general observation encapsulated in Brion Gysin's dictum
that 'writing is fifty years behind painting'.
After the exalted consummation in holy maternity (where the
religious emphasis is stronger now than in Petons: 'if the bud burst
open the Almighty blesses both fruit and seed...': XX), the section
moves towards a close with two sonnets (xxvi and xxvn) announcing
the subject of 'Sunset'. XXVI deals with the death of a young offspring
and the parents' suffering, and we recall that the Riquer couple
underwent this experience three times during their marriage.
Exclamation and questioning now cast a shadow over earthly bliss:
Un bressolet desert, sens vida, abandonat;
Un'ombra que a s'estén y atura un raig de llum:
un' alè dissipada com se dissipa'l fum.
(An empty cradle, lifeless, abandoned; a shadow that spreads and
blocks out a ray of light; breathing puffed away like disappearing
smoke.)
In XXVII unhappiness caused by the death of the adored spouse is
prefigured, for which 'intuition' Riquer resorts to the romantic cliche
of the shadow of Death:
Un fret intens la vida ha deturat,
com si passés enlayre pavorosa
la sombra de la mon tota negrosa!
(Life is halted by an intense cold, as though above our heads had
passed the black form of Death's quivering shadow!)
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83
'Sunset' corresponds to the second part of Petons, but is altogether
more highly worked. Only the first poem survives in the later reprise,
now converted into a sonnet and shorn of its more descriptive
elements but retaining its introductory role insofar as it presents the
moment of Dolors' death. The accumulation of stock romantic
imagery, associating darkness and cold with solitude and loss,
culminates here, with the poet in his plight likened to a dead leaf
buffeted by the hostile wind:
seure voldria al marge del camí,
mes, com la fulla, dins la boyra humida
lo fret mestral m'empeny per l'aspre vida. (XXXI)
(I would sit by the side of the road, but, like the leaf in the damp
mist, I am driven by the cold north-west wind along life's harsh
way.)
Melancholy and despair still dominate. The mood surges powerfully
in a motif which will come to the fore in Riquer's last poetic work,
the Poema del Bosch, that of man's destruction of the woods which
have witnessed the lovers' experience. Another characteristic Riquerian
variation is that of the woods stripped of their charm having lost
their fairy:
Feya fret; tot arraulit, jo traspassava les portes
del palau de fulles verdes, de fulles mustiguejades,
despossehit del encant lluminós de tes mirades.
(It was cold; I slunk through the doors of the green-leaf palace, its
leaves now withered, being bereft of the luminous charm of your
gaze.)
But now, unlike in Petons, Riquer can transcend despair through the
hope of being reunited beyond the grave with his beloved. The theme
of a love stronger than Death, rehearsed in Anyoranses as we have
considered, reappears here. The sincerity of feeling comes across
with a particularly strong charge deriving from the expression of
doubts about the possibility of such spiritual reunion:
Les llàgrimes de foch que tinch vessades,
ens acosten un d'altre? Si m'atanso,
les penes benhexo qu'he passades...
Qui sab si'ns allunyem com més me canso? (XXXII)
(The burning tears that I have shed, do they bring us closer
together? If I do come nearer then I bless the pain I have
suffered... But perhaps we are drifting further apart as I become
wearier?)
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These doubts inspire his fervent prayer to the Almighty to 'tighten
the bond which joins [us] eternally' (xxxv), and the luminous
certainty of being reunited finally prevails over doubt in the later
sonnets XLI and XLII, with their paradisiacal visions reminiscent of
Dante:
Bat a bat s'obriran les pones d'or recloses,
y endintre vibraran, en lloch de cants d'aloses,
los himness celestials; y una veu sublimada,
què'l pressentiria sols dexa lo cor suspens,
en un llenguatge nou dirà lo goig intens
de sentirse l'aymant en brassos de l'aymada. (XLI)
(The tightly closed golden gates will be flung open, and within will
ring out not lark-song but celestial hymns; and a sublime voice,
which even before it sounds makes the heart miss a beat, will sing
in a new language the intense joy of the lover feeling himself in the
arms of his beloved.)
The second collection in the composite volume of 1906 is Les
cullites (Harvests), subtitled 'short bucolic poem' and dedicated to
Eduard Marquina who had published a poem of the same genre in
Castilian. Les cullites is the part of this phase of Riquer's poetry
which has least affinity with the Pre-Raphaelite mode (and where the
spirit of the admired Apel·les Mestres is most strongly felt) and it is
perhaps on this account that these poems have merited least
attention from his recent commentators. Here Riquer consciously
adopts a classical model, in a bucolic hymn to bread, to wine, to
labour in the fields and to the gaiety of harvest time. As Mestres
insisted in his introduction to these pieces, there is here a very strong
note of personal experience and reminiscence —once again, strains of
the poet's country boyhood recreated and to a degree mythified—
sounding through the mannerism of a poetry which would otherwise
appear tradition-bound and stereotyped. Riquer's close identification
with his subject shows in the extraordinary precision, the loving
attention to detail, of his descriptions of country activities and the
behaviour of the peasant protagonists. Here the richness of the
characteristic vocabulary is savoured for its own sake and applied
again with the delicacy of the artist inspired by Ruskin's veneration
of beauty in Nature. The skirts of the girls hoeing, for example, in Les
virbadores are 'adorned with darnel, couch grass, fennel and savory'.
It is an aspect where the temper and voice of the poet sound in closest
harmony.
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85
The collection of 'Harvests' is simply a sequence of descriptive
poems on the cycle of agricultural production, following on
from the opening sonnet dedicated to Dawn, the
commencement of human labour as evoked in
'The ploughman', 'The sower',
'Germinal', 'The hoeing girls', 'The
reaper', 'The gleaner' and 'Threshing '. In three out of these eight
poems Riquer describes a twighlight
scene, felt as a priviliged moment,
the culmination of the day's labours,
touched with associations with
popular poetry and folksong, to which the calm and majestic rhythm
of the alexandrine applies a dignity appropriate to the poetic moment
par excellence. The decadent correlation of night-time with Death
figures nowhere here: on the contrary, night is the time when, as in
'Germinal', the earth fecundates its plant-life:
Mare terra germina, en nit serena,
axordada pels grills. Es lluna plena.
(Mother earth germinates, in the night serene, deafened by the
crickets. The moon is full.)
The spirit of this poetry is, then, fully vitalist in its dedication to
Mother Earth made fertile by man's labours in work which is hard
but which promotes a sense of peacefulness and even of joy. This
joyfulness in which the first cycle, on the making of Bread,
culminates is carried over into the second cycle about the making of
Wine, six sonnets which follow the same chronological pattern as the
previous set. After an opening poem in praise of wine, Riquer
expresses the uncertainties and hopefulness of grape-picking time,
the providential downpour which just saves the vines after summer's
drought, then the harvest itself, the girls trampling the grapes, and
the pleasures of deep imbibing. A similar healthy joyousness and
vital élan pervades these poems, as it does the preceding cycle,
culminating in the vision of the masia farmhouse in whiter and the
patriarch's prayer of thanks, Laus Deo, for a successful harvest and of
confidence in the continuity of life through the seasons.
This poem in particular, with its anecdotal and local-colour
costumista character, more pronounced than in any other part of
Les cullites, shows up the strength of the 'ruralist' strain in Riquer's
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writing. The line extends back, of course, to Quan jo era noy, a mode
which the author was still cultivating over the turn of the century, as
seen in the story Bartomeu, published in the important modernista
journal Joventut in 1900. Thus we encounter again, in Riquer the
poet, the eddying of a fundamentally conservative outlook—the
idealisation of the patriarchal countryside—that acquired renewed
force and relevance in Modernisme's urgent formulations of an
ideology of nationhood, and in the aesthetic currents tightly
associated with the dynamics of renovation. Many of the contradictions
of the situation as a whole are represented in the strengths and
weaknesses of Riquer as poet: ingenuousness deriving from idealism
and sincerity; reiterative sentimentalism condoned by the cult of
subjectivism; thinness of verbal texture arising from excessive faith
in the 'living word' when the native literary tradition itself remained
insecure and unconsolidated. Indeed, the first and most significant
part of the 1906 collection, the Aplech de sonets, often used as title for
the volume as a whole, is circumstantially related to contemporary
movements which were converging, at the levels of culture and of
political ideology, to rectify such perceived weaknesses in the
modernista progamme.
The connections between Anyoranses, Petons and Un poema
d'Amor are evident, which is our reason for leaving to last an
examination of Aplech de sonets, a set of poems marking a distinct
phase in Riquer's literary career.
The first feature to be remarked upon is the exclusive preference
(common to the whole of the 1906 volume) for the sonnet form.
Riquer, who in 1902 had declared the sonnet to be 'an unmusical
form', had obviously undergone quite a radical conversion. The fact
is that the sonnet had become, in the earliest years of this century, a
decidedly privileged form in the more cultivated modernista circles,
being the object of debate and the emblem of a concerted reaction
against spontaneous formal anarchy and against homespun provincialism in Catalan poetry, a movement which would subsequently
be taken over and firmly* channelled into Noucentisme's strict
mobilisation of cultural forces, with 'purges' of those values not
complying with its new conception of Classicism. In the initial stage,
though, arising from distinctly modernista impulses, Dante, Ronsard,
Baudelaire, Verlaine, the Parnassians, etc. supplied exemplary
models of the sonnet cultivated as the epitome of poetic rigour and
harmony. In the Catalan context the 'battle of the sonnet' was fought
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within Modernisme, then, and its outcome was materialised in a
distinct boom in this poetic form, in important contributions by Tell i
Lafont, Pin i Soler, Ruyra, Zanné, Alomar and others, and then by
the two outstanding noucentista exponents, Guerau de Liost and
Josep Carner. Beneath all the variety of interpretation in this activity
was a constant motivation: the idea that by cultivation of the sonnet
and creation of its own repertoire in this mode Catalan literature
would be joining in its own right the universal fraternity.
It is to this context that Riquer's definitive turn to the sonnet
belongs. As well as the sources mentioned above, a most particular
influence in his case was the Dante Gabriel Rossetti of The House of
Life. This is unequivocally announced in Riquer's placing, as
frontispiece to his own collection, his prose version of Rossetti's 'A
sonnet is a moment's monument,/Memorial from the Soul's eternity/
To one dead deathless hour...', the exemplary prelude to The House
of Life itself. Still in the introductory part of the collection, there
follow two sonnets in which the poet continues to set out his stall, not
without a certain ambivalence. While the first, invoking images of
the troubadour and the nightingale, expresses an idealistic concept of
inspired poetic utterance (with clear echoes of Maragall), the second
dedicated 'To Deceit', incorporates distinctly Parnassian notions of
culture and refined fancy as antidotes to 'painful, grumbling Truth'.
The tension is itself, in fact, consistent with various pulls within
Riquer's own 'split personality' as an artist. One such disjunction is
apparent in the contrast between the 'realism' of Les cullites and the
Aplech de sonets itself, a celebration of the civilised spirit. The work
belongs to the moment of Modernisme's apogee (1906) and of
Riquer's personal artistic trajectory. As such it contains many keys to
his literary temper, 'original' in that sense and also in the sense of the
confidence with which the poet essays a diversity of line-length (12-,
13-, 14- and even 16-feet lines) beyond the preferred hendecasyllable
of his admired Rossetti.
While the poem 'To Deceit' enshrines a declaration of anti-realist
principles, the collection as a whole is far removed from the
deliquescent symbolism of Crisantemes. The movement now is away
from dream-like mystery and vague synaesthesia,
, gran, hermosa Mentida
moradora deb horts de misteriosa flayre
(grand, beautiíul Deceit, dweller in the gardens of mysterious
aroma)
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and from the desire to feel her 'whimsical kiss', towards a vision of
great chromatic richness, with clearly Panassian limpidity and
sharpness of outline:
Boguèm per la blavor quieta d'un gran port
sentint batre l'onada en un porxo tranquil
qu'avansa les columnes de porfit escarlata
sobre un estol de cisnes de plomatge de plata.
(We row through the still blueness of a great harbour, feeling the
lap of the wave on a serene arcade jutting its columns of scarlet
porphyry above a flock of silver-feathered swans.)
The consistent focus of the idealism of Aplech de sonets is Art
itself, and this shift marks a significant development in Riquer's
evolution as a poet, turning from the sentimental and towards a more
reflective outlook. The tendency is away from present realities, into
sublime aspirations and the evocation of magnificent, distant
shadows of remote epochs. This latter mood is particularly strong in
the first two of the book's five parts Edat Antiga (Antiquity) and
Edat mitjana i Renaixement (Middle Ages and Renaissance), the two
great sources of Riquer's literary and artistic inspiration. There
follow Temps modern (Modern Times), devoted to the modern artists
admired by the poet, Bucòlica, and finally a miscellaneous section
entitled Varia.
Edat Antiga opens with a sonnet on the theme of Icarus,
symbolising the artist's urge to be freed of material constraints only
to be thwarted by death. The motif was a constant one in Riquer's
production, and widely recurrent in Modernisme's artistic code. In
L'esfinx the mystery of human destiny is posed; El vell de Teos and
Safo are anacreontic in manner, while similar exercises in opulent
nostalgia are carried out through evocations of Phryné, Perseus and
Nero. Riquer's reworking of the myths of Antiquity, recalling the
manner of the painter Böcklin, again unites his poetry and his
painting. Likewise, his vision of the Middle Ages enables him to
indulge in the world of the Gothic, so dear to his imagination. Lady
Godiva, Retaule, La Bella dama sens merci, Eljutglar, Dins del pati
and L'ermità, all of which suggest very sharp visual correspondences,
are finely chiselled miniatures which depict with detached meticulousness the set-pieces of an idealised milieu of courtly love.
The second part of this medieval tableau moves through the
passage into the Renaissance, with sonnets devoted to the great
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89
artists of the Quattrocento: Guido d'Arezzo, 'L' Aretino', Dante and
Giotto reunited in the evocation of the Crovegni chapel at Padua;
Dante and Leonardo da Vinci celebrated in A Florència; Botticelli's
famous Spring recalled in Riquer's poetry through the figure of the
model Simonetta Vespucci. We rediscover here Riquer's admiration
for the Italian primitives, that we remarked upon in Chapter II,
expressed in a marked preference for the idealistic and the decorative
in art. Also seen here, and allied to the latter trait, is the love of the
Renaissance, assimilated by Riquer as a sort of synthesis of Antiquity
and the Christian Middle Ages.
The sonnets in 'Modern Times' are particularly interesting insofar
as they give further insight into the workings and the evolution of
Riquer's artistic imagination. Not surprisingly, Pre-Raphaelism
figures prominently here, but not before an incursion into the France
of the eighteenth century. His feeling for the spirit of this period is
well attested by the contents of Riquer's library, which included
some very fine collectors' pieces, unking directly with the nice
homage to the great book-binder Derôme in the sonnet Mme de
Pompadour. Respective sonnets are dedicated to those embodiments
of the eighteenth-century ethos, Watteau and Boucher. What stirs
the poet is the elegance and the precious atmosphere of the world of
these two painters. As an illustration we can consider how Boucher's
Louis XV decor is admirably captured in the delicately colourful
touches of this quatrain, where the painterly eye controls the
words:
Tes creacions perfuman del zocol fins als frisos
l'ambient dels boudoirs roses y la sala enjoyada
pel bronze, l'alabastre y cornisa daurada
qu'avansa coronant els verds pàlids y'ls grisos.
(Your creations perfume, from plinth to friezes, the atmosphere of
the pink boudoirs and the room bejewelled in bronze and alabaster
with the gilded jutting cornice that crowns the pale greens and the
greys.)
This interest in the taste for eighteenth-century France reveal
quite a lot about Riquer's ideological development. That Catholic
Riquer, strictly moralistic, who was a founder member of the
conservative Cercle Artistic de Sant Lluc, the opponent of the nude
figure in art, is far removed from the Riquer of the dawning
twentieth century, the admirer of the galant, superficial and precious
atmosphere of pre-revolutionary France. The new 'open-mindedness',
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as we have seen, though, did not diminish Riquer's love of medieval
Christian mysticism. Indeed, what characterises the artist in his
maturity is a wide-arching eclecticism and liberality of spirit.
Something of this is felt in the sonnet 'On a page from Goethe's
Eridon and Amina', featuring the third great artist of the French
eighteenth century, Fragonard. It was he, according to Riquer, who
might have put voluptuousness into the exquisiteness of Goethe's
modern interpretation of ancient Greece. It is clear that a subtle shift
was taking place in the sensibility and taste of the artist around the
time of Aplech de sonets. The illustrations which he did for this
volume, as well as the book-plates designed between 1905 and 1914,
display a movement from an asymmetrical and swirling modernista
style to a more balanced and symmetrical line, taking up patterns
from the rococo and strains of baroque allegorical treatment of the
female form. It is yet another instance, this time an extremely telling
one, of the close and constant parallelism between literary and plastic
modes in Riquer, between lexis and opsis in his creative imagination.
Chopin, Schubert and Schumann are the musical representatives
in this part of Aplech de sonets, written at the time, we should recall,
when the lieds of the latter two composers were centre-pieces of the
musical evenings held at Riquer's studio workshop. Not surprisingly,
with such late-romantic points of reference, the poet here associates
music with the expression of nostalgia, sublimated despair or
melancholy. The poetry-music analogy itself, together with the
Mallarmean precedent of celebrating Wagner in verse, serves to make
this the most symbolistic section of the Aplech de sonets, where
Riquer attempts to evoke the ineffable mystery and beauty of melody
through synaesthesia and chromatic association:
En les nits blaves, lluminoses
Schubert, com s'alsen los teus cants.
(In luminous blue nights, Schubert, how your songs soar.)
In the case of Schumann the characteristic note is identified in the
expressive antithesis of music's sources in despair and its sublimating
powers:
De tes amargues llàgrimes y de tos desconsols,
esclaten poms de roses y cants de rossinyols.
(From your bitter tears and from your desolation burst forth
bunches of roses and nightingale songs.)
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The honesty of response and genuine feeling of spiritual communion
—despite the naive tone and stylistic texture—are similarly felt in the
three poems dedicated to the Pre-Raphaelites and the one to the
German idealist painter Arnold Bòcklin. The work of the latter was
known and admired in Catalonia from the 1890s, and had, with its
Wagnerian associations, considerable influence in modernista aspirations
to transcendental artistic expression and symbol, as in his famous
painting L'île de la Mort reproduced in the journal Joventut in 1900,
and discussed in an article there. Accordingly, what interests Riquer
about Bòcklin is the artist who recreates the major themes of Greek
mythology, the Bòcklin of centaurs and nereids, the pantheist like
himself in the first part of Aplech de sonets and in his paintings of the
early years of the twentieth century. His praise of Böcklin's 'burning
fantasy' helps to elucidate Riquer's idea of the 'whimsical kiss' in the
sonnet 'To Deceit', implying a sort of programme for an anti-realist
art, idealist in spirit but sharp in outline and limpid in vision,
removed from symbolist mistiness which is replaced by a 'Mediterranean'
transparency shot through with vitalist energies and myths. The
embryo of Noucentisme's programme and idiom is seen to be taking
shape within a vortex of terms and ideals of modernista origin. The
definition quite accurately characterises Riquer's position in 1906, as
it does that of many modernistes affected by the same momentum of
transition.
Further characterisation of the poet's personal curriculum comes
in the three sonnets devoted to modern English art. The first
presents the members of the famous Brotherhood as champions of an
exciting modern movement which triumphs over the insipid traditionalism of the Royal Academy. In the second quatrain Riquer
names the leading figures: Rossetti, Hunt, Millais, Madox Brown,
Burne-Jones, to which list are added their advocate Ruskin and Keats
(the latter rather incongruously present unless the inclusion is seen
as homage to the Arthurianism which was relayed to the Catalan
artist via Pre-Raphaelism). Then the two tercets are occupied
entirely by Rossetti, envisaged as recincarnation of 'a modern,
luminous Dante... radiating the fire of Beauty and beaming from his
heart the song of the pious lover'. Their basic affinity is referred
again to The House of Life which, as we have insisted, was Riquer's
inspiration for his death-transcending love poetry:
Es la Casa de Vida que s'obra ab tot l'esclat
llumínich, d'un art nou que dexa enlluhernat.
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(It is the House of Life which opens up with the full light-burst of a
new art which leaves one dazzled.)
Sonnet xxxii is also devoted to Rossetti, 'the worshipper and heir
of Beauty', who revived in the 'misty lands of Albion' the ashes of the
Florentine Renaissance with its 'exuberant richness of art, the
exquisite wholeness of good taste and wisdom', infusing new blood
and the vitality of southern Europe into the veins of British art. This
is nicely symbolised in the poem by the image of the ray of Italian
sunlight gilding a flat, grey landscape, and then by the extension of
the metaphor to refer to the warmth of love which melts the chilled
northern heart:
y ab l'escalf d'un petó dels llavis de Siddal
haveu dotat les neus d'un' ànima vital.
(And with the warmth of a kiss on Siddal's lips you have breathed
vital spirit into the snows.)
The third sonnet (xxxiv) glosses the figure of Robert Aiming Bell, a
minor member of the Pre-Raphaelite movement but a great
decorative artist, something which perhaps explains Riquer's special
admiration for him and the fact that it was with Bell himself that the
Catalan had enjoyed direct acquaintance. (The two had probably
met in London and in 1910 Riquer published a short book on Bell's
work, a detail on which we shall comment in our final chapter.)
Particular praise is expressed in this poem for Bell's recreation of
Renaissance qualities of texture and colour,
Tos policroms relleus y suntuoses vidrieres
l'encant de tes pintures y tes decoacións
prosseguexen l'esfors de Florentines eres.
(Your polichrome reliefs and sumptuous stained glass, the charm of
your paintings and decorations continue the effort of Florentine
days.)
and for his his bibliophile's passion for the art of the book, a sphere in
which the English artist was an acknowledged master:
Absort, el bibliòfil veu tes ilustracións,
y devot de Bellesa qu'adora'l temps passat,
com qui sent un nou himne, eh guayta extasiat.
(The bibliophile, all absorbed, views your illustrations; worshipper
of Beauty adoring byegone days, as though hearing a new hymn, he
looks upon them in ecstasy.)
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93
Aplech de sonets, then, confirms Riquer's deep admiration for the
Pre-Raphaelites and indicates the three facets of this attraction:
painting, poetry and the decorative arts, in particular the art of the
book. Also clearly marked here are the two lines which Riquer found
strengthened from contact with the English movement: the delight in
the Gothic and the sentiment from Dante, augmented and relayed by
Rossetti, of transcendent love itself analogous with an ideal of art.
These poems constitute thus intimate, literary expression of Riquer's
'English connection', the historical documentation of which will be
the subject of our Chapter V.
Bucòlica, a sequence of ten sonnets, reiterates Riquer's life-long
and profoundly ingrained fixation with the forest and with woodland
imagery: the forest as enchanted place, centre of wonderment and
site of happiness, recreated in fancy but always depicted with
meticulous precision and eye for detail in the description of the
inhabitant flora and fauna. Two contradictions require comment
here. The first is that this section of Aplech de sonets was,
surprisingly, dedicated to Eugeni d'Ors who, as Xènius the highpriest of Noucentisme, repeatedly declared himself to be an enemy of
the woodland and of everything that smacked of 'ruralism', in
pronouncements from his Glosari that began precisely in 1906. The
cultural tide-turn that we referred to above, and Riquer's own rather
insecure position in this, would explain this ostensibly paradoxical
conjunction. The other contradiction is also familiar from aspects
already reviewed of Riquer's art. The fact is, nevertheless, that in
Bucòlica as in other examples of his 'bucolic' manner the poet seems
best to resolve the fundamental tension in his art, between close
observation of the real and flights of fancy. For it is in this vein that
reality best and most harmonically serves him as a spring-board into
the realms of the imaginary, the marvellous and the mythical, with
anthropmorphism as the most consistent resource in this process.
In Bucòlica one swiftly recognises that water is associated with
femeninity: in Pirinenca 'the foaming waters/cascade, unfurling their
white locks', and in Boyra d'Hivern (Winter Mist) 'the mist is all
made up of the pale nudity of the Water-sprite/and of the hazy
Nymphs'. In the springs hidden deep in the woods there live the
Naiads, the fairies and the water-sprites, but these springs are also,
and above all, the mythical hideaway for solitary contemplation and
the quest for an ideal of beauty. A recurrent theme in all of Riquer's
bucolic work is the pursuit and discovery of the lost spring in the
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heart of the woodland —pure, unsullied, virginal— reserved for the
poet alone, revealing only to him its secret mysteries. Perhaps
Riquer's El lloch hont granen les flors (The place where the flowers
seed: XLI) or La font ignorada (The unknown spring: xxxix), where
we read,
Oh font, intima font discreta y ignorada,
ja has apagat la set febrosa de mon cos,
presentam la bellesa de ta gentil Nayada.
(Oh spring, intimate spring, discreet and undiscovered, now you
have quenched the fevered thirst of my body, show me the beauty
of your graceful Naiad.)
were recalled by the great poetic heir of Noucentisme, Carles Riba, in
the memorable lines of his tannka:
(La Poesia?
Cal cercar-la on tu saps ja
que és, com la gràcia
o l'aigua pura i dura
d'una font emboscada.
(Poetry? It must be sought where you already know it is, like
Grace, or the pure hard water of a woodland spring.)
The difference in diction as well as in control of the poetic idea and
material summarises not only the distance in quality between the
two writers but also an entire and immensely condensed chapter in
the history of Catalan as a modern literary language. But we
digress... In Riquer's vision we detect strong strains of erotic
implications —basically conventional in conception— in the sublimated
quest, wherein the spring is occasionally replaced by a solitary flower
of incomparable beauty, as in Flors solitàries (xxxvn) and A una
orquidea (XLII).
The desire to melt into the forest's deepest recesses lead him to
wish to be buried there (XLIV), to rediscover a sort of primeval
harmony. There are in thisand other pieces echoes of Buddhism and
Eastern mysticism, characteristic of the orientalist current along
which Riquer and other modernistes were carried, at a time when, as
remarked in our Chapter II, the poet was frequenting Maynade's
Llibreria Orientalista. Far from mankind, in sweet solitude, the poet
surrenders to an ecstasy rendered eternal through death, finding
access to that marvellous world in which the whole inheritance of
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95
tradition, lore and legend —'the water-sprites and fairies which have
died out the world over'— would be revived:
d'un pastó' adolescent sentir la dolsa veu,
y al luny, com un recort de Grècia agonitzant
los planyivols accents de les flautes de Pan.
(To hear the sweet voice of a youthful shepherd, and afar, like a
memory of Greece in decline, the plaintive strains of Pan's
flutes.)
The voice and the cliches belong unmistakably to Riquer, but it is
interesting to see how the controlling spirit of this poetry coincides
closely, both in its pantheism and in its apotheosic idealism, with
that of the mature writing of the the most representative of
modernista poets, Joan Maragall.
As its name suggests, Varia, is the most heterogeneous sequence of
Aplech de sonets. Its eight sonnets relate to diverse themes, more or
less marginal or complementary to Riquer's central artistic concerns.
The first, on fox-hunting, belongs to the former category, while the
second —evoking in dramatic and sinister terms the lonely death of a
poor old woman—and the fifth, Zoideal—an almost mystical
incantation, with its mantra-like title, to the echoing of the
unobtainable ideal— refer to the limits of the modernista imagination.
La musa verda (The green Muse: L) takes up again the theme from
'To Deceit' of banishing 'burdensome realities'. Here, though, the
poet appeals not to the 'glorious vision, light of consolation and life',
but to the 'mad woman', the Muse of absinthe, who begets 'great
monsters with fevered stare'. The poem may well correspond to a
moment of depression in the artist's life, when he imaginatively
explored this route of evasion or artificial paradise so fashionable
among the nineteenth-century artístic bohèmia. This single sonnet,
however, is hardly sufficient to qualify Riquer as a poète maudit,
especially when it is set against the evidence of a temperate life-style,
confirmed in the celebration of wine, in such poems as Les cullites, as
an organic product associated with health and natural processes. We
recall, in this respect, the way in which conventional morality
prevails in Riquer when confronted by the full implications of
Decadence, as in the way he recoils before the 'stench of the city' in
Quan jo era noy and before the 'Modern Bacchante' in Crisantemes.
Truer to Riquer's artistic metier is the seventh sonnet in Varia,
introducing an interest of his mature phase that he shared with the
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painter-author Santiago Rusiñol. At least two paintings by Riquer
from this period follow the example of Rusinol in seeking to capture
the subtleties of atmosphere in symmetrically laid-out parks, and it
must be remembered that he also followed Rusiñol's lead, around
1912-1913, in painting the gardens of Aranjuez near Madrid. The
sonnet expresses the corresponding mood of a highly filtered
symbolism, where decadent tones are subjected to a civilising
control:
Grandiosa ruina deserta d'uns jardins
que visqueren el luxe de centúries passades.
(Grandiose deserted ruins of gardens which lived through the
luxury of past centuries.)
and it captures well the feeling, present in the cognate work of both
painters, of resigned solitude and arrested time as an intimation of
eternity:
Un misteri rondina dins son desert ambient
hont les hores s'han mort y'ls arbres van crexent.
(Mystery murmurs in its deserted air where the hours have died
and the trees still grow.)
It is one of the moments when, in terms of intrinsic literary quality
and also of a wider appropriateness, that the poetry is truest to the
artistic personality.
Seen as a whole, Aplech de sonets, Les cullites, Un poema d'Amor,
is a disparate collection whose only unity lies in the exclusivity of the
sonnet form. Chronologically central within Riquer's production, it
embraces all the terms of the author's literary capacity. While the
Aplech de sonets and Un poema d'Amor hark back to, and in a sense
represent culminations of Anyoranses and Petons, there is in the
Bucòlica sequence the continuation of another vein, close to the
poet's heart, which for him remained unexhausted. It is, moreover, a
vein which cuts across fron the early prose works to the love poetry.
The imaginative pantheism, rather primitively adumbrated in Quan
jo era noy and which assumed, sporadically, a more refined guise in
Crisantemes, achieves its fullest expression in the long poem of 1910,
Riquer's last literary work, the Poema del Bosch. Here the author,
becoming uncomfortable or alienated in the face of the newly
dominant forces at work in Catalan culture, indulges in a sustained
incursion into the favourite domains of his life and his fancy, his
beloved forest and woodlands.
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97
The Poema del Bosch, Riquer's most consuming and ambitious
literary work, represents in a sense his poetic testament. Comprising
3,323 lines in all, it divides into eighteen still lengthy segments and a
final ode to Bacchus. The preferred metre is a line of thirteen feet,
built into stanzas of irregular length, quatrains and five-line verses
often giving way to units whose greater length is determined in the
main by syntax. As Castellanos remarks, Riquer seems at home in
this broad-framed, narrative structure which does not place too great
a strain on his control of language, a slackness of style and a tendency
to fall into cliche being evident weaknesses of his other verse.
It is clear that the Poema del Bosch engaged the poet's attention
and energies over a long period. Eleven of the sections are dated 1901
and 1902, while the other seven are assigned to a spate of activity in
1909. The published arrangement does not follow the order of
composition, and Riquer's careful recording of chronology would
indicate his intimate commitment to his poem. We certainly discern
that the final order was designed to portray an internal evolution of
mood and an implied passage of time. The first poems taken
together, up to IX (Fada Doralissa), convey a more peaceful and
idyllic vision than the set beginning with Aquelarre (Witches'
Sabbath: x), the latter bringing to the enchanted world of the forest
perversion superstition and, ultimately, the destruction of its
mythical universe. Certainly, the vision darkens as evil erupts, and
the tone is altogether more dramatic in the 1909 sections. We have
suggested already that this process might be related to the major seachange occurring for Catalan culture in these years and to Riquer's
increasing alienation in these circumstances.
By 1909 Noucentisme's purge of the 'embarassing' features of its
own antecedents was at its most energetic. Many modernistes
returned, or were driven, into the wilderness. Riquer was among
these and, as we have mentioned, by this time he virtually ceased
working in the field of decorative art, the victim of a change in taste
and fashion which caused him considerable economic hardship.
Already from 1907 his participation in art exhibitions had become
sporadic and relatively unsuccessful. These years are the most
obscure period of his life, in large measure because his literatureinspired paintings of the time found no favour at all with the critics
and new arbiters of taste. In such circumstances, a feeling of rejection
on Riquer's part, of living through the dissolution of a movement
with which he had been identified, would be as understandable as the
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turn for solace to literature, a type of literature which, more or less
consciously, is a coming-to-terms with isolation at the same time as a
self-justifying assertion of values now misunderstood. Riquer was
certainly not alone in this reaction which is characteristic of
Modernisme driven, as it were, underground. Crisis and disorientation
would also seem to be manifest in the fact that Riquer chose not to
illustrate the Poema del Bosch himself, and in his choice of some
ponderous baroque woodcuts to accompanying his text The incongruity,
significant in itself, is probably explained both by creative insecurity
and by concession to newly-prevailing criteria of taste.
Noucentisme's mythification of the City, its exaltation of control,
discretion and urbane values meant, basically, a condemnation of an
art inspired in Nature which entailed an aesthetics of spontaneity,
emotion and sacrosanct creative freedom. The conflict is felt,
translated and deplored in the Poema del Bosch in terms of the
destruction of a paradise existing both in geography and in the
realms of the imagination: the woodland. From the view-point of
Noucentisme, and still now, viewed with historical perspective, the
poem is grounded in an impenitent justification of a 'ruralist'
tradition that Modernisme took up from the Renaixença and the Jocs
Florals. The radicalisation of this line undertaken by vanguard
modernistes like Casellas, Víctor Català and Bertrana is submerged
beneath the weight of its profoundly conservative origins and legacy
in the opening sonnet of the Poema del Bosch. The invocation here of
the Felibrige's Copa Santa linked to 'Homeland, Love and Poetry'
chimes in with the spirit of the prefatory letter supplied by none
other than the patriarchal Felibre, Frederic Mistral. The underlying
ideological import of Riquer's artistic nostalgia is disclosed even
more definitively in the association 'song-homeland-forest', the
proclamation of the rural and 'popular' roots of Catalan culture,
from the same introductory poem:
El cant que jo oferexo ben meu, que s'ageganta
fonentse ab lo tresor que te la pàtria mia,
barbolla'l rondineig qu'en la vesprada canta
el bosch tot ple d'aromes quan va morintse'l dia.
(The song I offer, all my own, swelling to melt into my homeland's
treasure-store, mutters the same vague message that the aromaladen woods sing at the dying of the day.)
Intrinsic to the sentiment here is a body of ideas, precisely those
lambasted by Xènius as a facile Romantic legacy confusing aesthetics
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99
with hygiene, morality with patriotism, in a hackneyed vision of 'the
true Catalonia' which it was Noucentisme's mission to eradicate.
The criticism and the conflict of values can themselves be seen
now in historical perspective. The nineteenth-century rediscovery of
the Catalan landscape, the resurgence of popular music, folklore and
legend, were far too important and influential to be written off by
strokes of urbane irony. The Poema del Bosch betrays its deepest
roots by being given a post-script in the form of the score of the song
El Jutglar (The Minstrel) by the composer J. Pahissa. The nostalgia,
for all its superficial effects, represents a substantial cultural import.
As already remarked in connection with Aplech de sonets, this
conscientious cultivation of popular tradition, the recovery of the
medieval inheritance, both bound to concepts of 'roots' in the
affirmation of a national identity, are inextricably linked, as Riquer's
work exemplifies, with the main currents of European idealism in the
latter half of the nineteenth century. The reworking of the Arthurian
cycle, initially in primitive Romantic terms and then refined through
Pre-Raphaelism and the influence of Wagner, has to be understood in
relation to the broad European movement as well as to its specifically
Catalan manifestations.
This much indicates how the Poema del Bosch represents a reprise
of poetic concerns and behaviour which Aplech de sonets seemed to
have superseded, insofar as the latter collection tentatively acknowledged
post-modernista tendencies. Control and formal rigour—hallmarks of
the new Classicism—could hardly be expected of this 'sprawling' and
'tangled' composition, images used by contemporary commentators
like Casellas and Masriera to liken the character of the book to that
of its subject. Where Classicism does come in is in the mythical
dimension, in the theme of the permanence of the ancient world,
blending with the other legendary material. It is thus one component
of the work's heterogeneity and diffraction, its lack of overall
cohesion. Despite the evidence (in a letter from Maragall to Riquer)
that the poet worked to a plan and that, in line with it, he consciously
reshuffled the order of the poems, the impression is one of profusion
and of a multiplicity of occasionally contradictory aspects, an
outpouring of the creative imagination, true only to the artistic spirit
of the individual mind which conceived it. In this sense the Poema
del Bosch is a most unapologetically modernista work, Riquer's
artistic testament, as we have remarked, which enshrines a theoretical
and an active riposte to Noucentisme as he understood it.
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Riquer's mystical communion with the woodland as the seat of
Myth, the sacred sanctuary of Nature, Love and Beauty—together
constituting the artist's raison d'etre—here reaches its sustained
climax, in repeated echoing of the song of the spring:
jo soch altar y font d'hont brolla Poesia.
(I am the altar and the fount from which Poetry issues.)
The key-stone of the great edifice is the opening song, originally
intended to conclude the work (on the evidence of Maragall), a detail
which confirms the mature Riquer's awareness of its strategic and
programmatic nature:
D'Occident a Orient arredosso la historia
desde'ls veils Prometeus fins al moment actual...
Del bosch de Kalidassa, la selva de Virgili,
qu'ab la romana llengua de nou transcriu l'idili,
al naxement d'aurora ab que nos extasia
Beethoven component la nona simfonia,
tot viu dins la fecon matriu naturalesa
ahont arrela'l germen creador de bellesa.
(From West to East I shelter history, from the time of the ancient
Prometheus up to the present moment... Since the woods of
Kalidassa and the glades of Vergil who retranscribed the idyll into
the Roman tongue, until the dawn-burst with which Beethoven
transports us with his composition of the Ninth Symphony,
everything lives in fertile Mother Nature wherein the creative seed
of beauty strikes root.)
This is the Temple of Life, the ample accommodation of that urgent
totality sought by the poet and manifested in his sweeping incorporation
of so many diverse motifs from so multifarious cultural origins.
Profusion and exuberance are themselves essences of this pantheistic
vision of a Nature which is neither the Symbolists' dreaded enemy of
Man and his culture nor the Decadents' dark mirror of the
unfathomable mysteries of consciousness. The Woodland is harmony
of infinite vastness, perpetual cycles of germination, growth and
movement, whose energies are reproduced in the vital outflowing of
poetry.
This dynamism is orchestrated in the scope of Riquer's themes, in
the metrical diversity of the eighteen sections and in the strength of
sensation conveyed through a constant resorting to anthropomorphic
images: the grandiose forest 'heaves' in the night, the silent stars
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'twinkle with delight and desire' in their golden spheres. Within this
universal vibration of cosmic harmony the poeta clarvident ('the poet
as seer') discovers also the 'love and the immense peace of the forest',
the mystical silence of communion with the Absolute, expressed as a
vision of the Redeemer:
L'imatge del Silenci s'imposa commoguda,
estesos els dos brassos, fixada, quieta, muda,
(The image of Silence imposes itself, deeply moved, with arms
outstretched, motionless, serene, unspeaking.)
This same forest is also the stage of the cultural history of
Mankind. In section III, 'The Woodland defends itself', Nature resists
its enemy, Man the predator, who brings cultivation, with ideas of
productivity and profit, into the paradisiacal realms of Beauty. Fire is
the agent of Man's ravages, yet in the beginning Nature is able to
counter its effects with a stronger, vital energy, conserved in the deep
sanctuary of its innermost recesses,
... /a nau que guarda com arca misteriosa
l'intens secret de vida en atri sacrosant.
(... the nave which guards like a mysterious ark the intense secret
of lite at its holiest inner sanctum.)
All the contradictions of such anti-industrial utopianism, taken at its
face value, are apparent: it remains true, nonetheless, that such
sentiments, deriving from the central Nature/Civilisation discourse
of the nineteenth century, exercised considerable attraction throughout
a whole cycle of evolution of the Western imagination. It is to this
generalised phenomenon that many of the socio-cultural tensions of
Catalan Modernisme ultimately relate.
The distinctly religious drift of Riquer's vision, within the general
tendency, articulates his individual sensibility. In section vii pagan
ritual—'occult fantasy of sanctified crime' that profanes 'the purest
site of life'—is contrasted with the religion of peace and harmony
that springs from the contemplation of Nature as a reflection of its
Creator. In this the poet discloses that conventional, Catholic cast of
mind that prevented him from participating in the more radical
reaches of modernista metaphysical speculation. The radicalism of
the Poem del Bosch lies in its Ruskinian identification of Nature and
Art, and, as we have insisted, in its repudiation of both the aesthetics
and the ethics of Noucentisme, in its reaffirmation of the sublime,
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Messianic role of the Artist and, by extension, of the sacred
inviolability of his artistic freedom.
Riquer here relates Man's evil to his identification with the group
and society, in total contrast to Noucentisme's insistence on the
civilising values of citizenship. The old individualism thus powerfully
reasserts itself: lovers, poets and hermits, those who as individuals
live in harmony with the primal forces of Nature, the Romantic
heroes in other words, are the only ones to escape condemnation. In
'The Devil's Cross' (XII) the repentant criminal who worships Christ
on a rude cross in the depths of the wood is hounded and killed with
the result that this social act creates a superstition which inverts the
religious meaning of the crucifix. It is interesting to observe how
Riquer's mind restores the conventional value to images which had
been challenged or subverted in aspects of modernista creativity. The
Black Mass, which in Casellas' Els sots feréstecs, for example, bodies
forth the terrifying experience of a Godless universe, is seen in
Aquelarre as an aberration and a profanation of Nature. For Riquer
salvation from the grip of darkness, sexuality and sorcery—the abyss
beyond the limits of the mind—comes in the guise of Saint Hubert's
deer, clad in the mystical clarity of dawn.
Throughout Riquer's writing it
is literature itself, in a wide diversity of precedent and sources,
which supplies the frame in which
feeling and experience are (often
too rigidly) set. Accordingly, in
the Poema del Bosch, the cultural
history of mankind is related
essentially to two great traditions
that configure the bulk of Riquer's
production, both in visual images
and in words: first, the world of
classical literature and myth, as in
La driade (iv) and in the imitation
of Theocritus, Bosch d'Arcadia
(Arcadian Wood: v); then sustained
variations on folk and fairy-tale
themes in IX, XII and XIII, and the
legendary medieval world of
Escalibor (VIII). The latter is the best illustration of Riquer's attempt
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to blur the boundaries between traditional subject-matter and the
products of his imagination in a process that becomes analogous with
poetic creativity itself. The essential motivation is at once intensely
private and representatively public, in the sense that awareness of
the 'nationalist' function of cultural activity is never far from the
surface. (This is, indeed, as Arthur Terry has remarked in another
context, the distinctive and differential feature of Catalan art of the
whole modern period).
Thus the version of Arthurian legend that appears in Escalibor is
the universal myth set distinctly in terms of an idealistic Catalan
nationalism whose very historicism is its primary motor. The
legendary knight of the Breton cycle adopts in prophetic terms the
motto (Pàtria, Fides, Amor,) of the Jocs Florals, with all that this
implied in terms of a political vision already superseded by the
bourgeois nationalism of Noucentisme but still sentimentally potent
for all that:
.. .-Oh vella profecia
tu que dius l'arribada del hèroe, impacient,
qu'ha de cenyir l'espasa que sigles ha dormia,
te prench en nom de Pàtria, en nom de Fe y Amor.
(Oh ancient prophecy that announces the arrival of the impatient
hero who will bind on the sword taken from the slumber of
centuries, I take you in the name of the Motherland, in the name of
Faith and Love.)
This section of the Poema del Bosch stands as a kind of compendium
of all that the idealised Middle Ages represented to the fin-de-siècle
poetic imagination, and also of the two channels by which this
content was directed to apply to the self-image of Catalan culture as
it was shaped upon Romantic foundations: on the one hand, Wagner,
the inspirer of the idea of a 'total Art' and the powerful rekindler of
the force of the old myths; on the other hand, and most particularly
in Riquer's case, the affinity with that branch of contemporary
British art centred in Pre-Raphaelite cultivation of Arthurian themes
and epitomised in Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations for Malory's
Morte d'Arthur.
The convergence of the ancient and the medieval traditions in the
attraction exercised upon Riquer by the Florentine Renaissance is
introduced into the chronological order of the Poema del Bosch by
the most esoteric poem in the collection: El camí perdut (The Lost
Track: VI). Here the clouds which envelop the forest and the
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intangible mist in which the poem is shrouded are—now in
accordance with the purest symbolist vision—emblems of the
mysterious veil concealing a reality of a higher order, forever lost. El
camí perdut evokes enigmas of engulfed civilisations whose ruins
continue to fascinate us and a luminous truth known to the
woodland spirits but of which they will disclose nothing. These are
the secrets of the forest (Nature, Creation, Being) that the poet
senses and to which he strives to give equivalent form. His privileged
status gives access to the eternal myths which are invisible to that
'pale passer-by', modern man who is a stranger to the woodland
ways,
acostumat al luxe de la vila daurada,
que no compren del bosc l'amor, l'immensa pau.
(accustomed to the luxury of the gilded town, who knows not the
love nor the immense peace of the forest.)
The closing sections of the Poema del Bosch focus on the modern
world and provide the poet with the opportunity to re-set and update motifs already worked out in his writing. Saint Francis of Assisi
(already the subject of an important painting of 1890) evinces the
admirable harmony of man and Nature in 'Lari of the Birds' (xv),
where the figure of the saint reappears in a modern, lay version
embodied in the poor, misunderstood shepherd. The Daphnis and
Chloë legend and the pastoral idyll already essayed in Bosch
d'Arcadia reappears in contemporary dress and local costumista
setting in Fluviolejant (Pipe-playing: XVI). The book moves towards a
concluding note of defeat and lament in 'Destruction' (xvii) where
man's ravages of the forest and all that it stands for provoke a muted
diatribe against the materialism of the urban-industrial world that
has cut him off from the sacred harmonies of natural beauty:
Ha mort, ha mort el bosch; sols queda una migrada
imatge del que f ou la catedral sagrada
ahont resava un càntich l'ardent naturalesa,
grandiós com may l'han fet tants segles de bellesa.
(The wood is dead, is dead; all that is left is the scant image of the
sacred cathedral of yore, where ardent nature entoned a prayer as
magnificent as ever it was made by the beauty of centuries.)
The logic of this concluding movement is disturbed, however, by
the intercalation of the section Les vinyes (The Vineyards: xvii)
which sings the glory of wine, the product of processes of cultivation
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105
that have usurped the woodlands, in a vein similar to that of Les
cullites. This is quite at odds with the condemnatory Ode to Bacchus
wherein conviviality is identified with the forces that have destroyed
the earthly paradise. If some of the momentum of the whole is
thereby lost, the Poema del Bosch stands nevertheless as a remarkable
literary monument to a faith that was overtaken by the tides of taste,
and of history.
Our view from this perspective confirms what has frequently been
said elsewhere: that the artístic and literary development of
Alexandre de Riquer followed a circular trajectory, that in his final
years he returned to his first loves. His landscape paintings from
1910-1920, as much as the Poema del Bosch, display the same
reversion to the privileged subject which inspired both his early
realist drawings and paintings of La Segarra and the semi-autobiographical narratives of his literary debut. What must be stressed,
though, are the transformations that occurred in Riquer's vision of
that same Nature, in relation to the circumstances in which his
career evolved. The young artist of the 1880s, restless and ambitious
but unsure of himself and of his directions, at a time when Catalan
art was outgrowing Realism but still unclear about new departures, is
very different from the extremely cultivated man in maturity,
exposed to the main cultural influences of his day and steeped in the
strongest traditions behind them. We have followed the changes of
aesthetic outlook and the subsequent refinements of expression
between Quan jo era noy and Crisantemes, refinements which would
themselves be modified in the natural (but not altogether fulfilled)
progression into poetry. The final stage occurred, of course, at a time
of personal crisis and also at a time when the cultural milieu in which
Riquer had matured and flourished was itself subjected to severe
internal strain. So many of the contradictions, reiterations, cliches
and reticences of his artistic production—more so in words than in
images—are due as nuch to the interplay of Riquer's expressive
strengths and limitations with these circumstances as they are to the
limitations themselves. On the one hand, the slackness of his literary
diction and the lack of concentration in verbal resources are related
to the contemporary condition of Catalan as a literary medium,
before Pompeu Fabra's linguistic reforms and the whole associated
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process of stringent perfectionism and self-awareness that Noucentisme
grafted into the repertoire. On the other hand, the writer's impulse is
to move out from the real world (which he can describe with
extraordinary freshness and colour, with touches appropriate to his
painterly eye) into the realms of the imagination, fancy and myth.
His role is to suggest to his readers some of the ineffable qualities of
these subjective perceptions. In this, too, Riquer was a writer of his
times, and he did not always successfully negotiate the pitfalls of this
symbolist vein: the sentimentality, the cliche and the impression
created that the world herein evoked is literature-deferred rather
than life-referred. There are moments, nonetheless, when the voice
of the author rings out sharp and true, and when we can still feel that
we are in genuine communication with a complex and engaging
creative personality.
There are reasons, beyond the historical or archaeological ones,
that make Riquer a 'readable' author still today. One may prefer the
fresh naivety of Quan jo era noy to the more sophisticated early
poetry or to the intriguingly rich luxuriance of the Poema del Bosch.
Or one may prefer to savour Crisantemes as a collection of rare
miniatures of the most exquisite Art Nouveau, especially if one is
lucky enough to be handling the original (and still, regrettably, only)
edition. This will be a question of taste. What is important is an
understanding of the course of a literary and artistic career which
went through a whole historical period of crisis and of cultural
reassessment, opening on to twentieth-century horizons, while
retaining adherence to certain values and traditions of an older social
order. Alexandre de Riquer exemplifies thus, in a very particular way
and, paradoxically perhaps, more completely than many of his
contemporaries, that resonant declaration in Baudelaire's Le peintre
et la vie moderne, already quoted: 'La modernité, c'est le transitoire, le
fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l'art, dont l'autre moitié est l'éternel
et l'immuablé'. The term fin-de-siècle assumes a particularly full
meaning when applied to an artist whose life and oeuvre spanned
that momentous turning-point. The tension between his Catholicaristocratic education and the commitment to a concept of 'the
modern' as he saw it is a deep characteristic that enhances Riquer's
representativeness of Modernisme and of the Catalan fin-de-siècle.
CHAPTER V
DOCUMENTS
The near-simultaneous flowering throughout
Europe of the phenomenon we now recognise as
Art Nouveau is only explained by the extremely
swift diffusion of artistic models and ideas, and
by their active interplay across community
boundaries. Nineteenth-century improvements
in transport made the old continent shrink while
bringing the Old World and the New closer
together: 'international' exhibitions became
virtually commonplace; art journals and literature circulated widely and rapidly; personal
contacts between artists were facilitated as study
visits and periods of residence abroad were
increasingly taken for granted. Barcelona,
reaffirmed by the end of the nineteenth century
in its historical role as commercial and cultural
cross-roads, was a major centre of fin-de-siècle
artistic activity, even though the city's importance in this respect has only recently come to be
fully appreciated in historical perspective. The
foregoing chapters have investigated the part
played by Alexandre de Riquer in the Catalan
dimension of a truly international movement
and in the local assimilation of those ideas and
artistic currents that configured in large measure
the outstanding phenomenon of Catalan
Modernisme. The following pages now present
and comment on the documentary evidence of
Riquer's direct contacts with the world of contemporary British are and, to a much lesser extent,, with North
American art.
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1. Alexandre de Riquer's visits to England
a) Some commentators give 1874 as the date of Riquer's first stay in
London, at the age of 18. This is quite unsubstantiated. The family
history written by our subject's grandson (Martí de Riquer, Quinze
generacions d'una família catalana, 1979) shows incontrovertibly that
in early 1874 Alexandre was at the Beaux-Arts school in Toulouse; by
March he was with his father in Pau, later to go, in that same month,
to the Spanish Basque country. By April he was back in Barcelona.
b) In 1879 Riquer visited Italy. No correspondence from this journey
survives, but it is corroborated by some drawings and a picture
signed and dated Rome, 1879.
An otherwise reliable biographical sketch of Riquer published in
the collection Lectura Popular (Vol. VI, 1916) gives 1879 as the date
of his first visits to Paris and London, as an extension of the Italian
journey. As well as there being no documentary evidence of such an
itinerary, there is the equally conclusive fact, as we have remarked
already in our Chapter II, that Riquer's artistic production and
development bear no marks of a contact which would certainly have
left a deep impression on a creative personality in a very receptive
and formative stage.
c) That Riquer did visit London eventually in 1894 is documented by
two letters, dated 30 May and 1 June 1894, from his wife Maria
Dolors Palau, which have been conserved by the family of Josep
Maria de Riquer. Lolita's complaints about her husband's long
absence indicate that he was in London for some two months, over
May and June. An envelope discloses his address—The Charing
Cross Hotel—a residence which was obviously to his liking since he
would return there in 1906.
A letter from Riquer, translated and reproduced by Fernando
Arteaga in his article on the Catalan artist commissioned by The
Studio (Vol. XIX, April l900), contains a pondered and revealing
statement by Riquer, who declared that it was:
a journey that fixed my present theory of art. It was then that
English art revelead itself to me in all the strength of its deep
rooted personality. After I had been admiring the Old Masters at
the galleries the Modern Masters stood before me as strong as ever,
and with all their profound knowledge of their art —Burne-Jones,
Millais, Moore, and, above all to me, Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
blazing like a sunflower of poetry, reflecting and reproducing
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absolute beauty. And then, outside the galleries, there were Aubrey
Beardsley's Avenue Theatre poster on the walls of the streets and
of the Underground railway stations, his Yellow Book cover in the
booksellers' windows, Hardy's 'Gaiety Girl' at the theatre doors,
the first number of The Studio on the bookstalls. I was dazzled by
the brilliance of schemes of art that responded to my own ideas, as
well as by the originality and richness of the creations of industrial
art due to the genius of William Morris. I picked up what I could
from all this, and carefully wrote down my impressions of it all, for
I meant to proclaim these hitherto unknown glories in Catalonia.
Especially I brought back with me the first number of The Studio,
and I am proud of the fact that, when in other places that now
eagerly follow in it every manifestation of Modern Art there was
still an almost complete ignorance of this wonderful Review, there
are artists in Barcelona among its earliest subscribers.
It is interesting to note here how the excitement of a personal
discovery is linked to an awareness of the collective significance of
this 'modernity'.
d) From the end of November and through December 1906
Alexandre de Riquer was travelling in England, an important
journey as far as artistic relations between England and Spain are
concerned. As mentioned in our Chapter II, the journey was made in
the company of the friend and colleague J.M. Tamburini, in
connection with the Barcelona International Exhibition of Fine Arts
and Artistic Industries of 1907. Details of Riquer's activities as
official commissioner for the English section at this exhibition are
reviewed below in our Section 3.
e) The journeys to England of 1894 and 1906 are the only ones for
which documentary evidence exists. While any visit there in 1879
can be virtually discounted, there does remain the tantalising—
though as yet undocumented—possibility that Riquer might have
been to England around 1901-1902. The indications of this are
tenuous but not improbable. Riquer's official nomination as English
commissioner for the 1907 Barcelona exhibition, in a decree which
made explicit reference to his profound knowledge of the English art
world and of his privileged contacts with many artists, is perhaps
hard to explain on the basis of a single visit in 1894, when the
Catalan artist was completely unknown in London. Moreover it is
noteworthy that in 1903 Riquer sold to the Barcelona Museum of Art
and Archaeology José Ribera's Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew for
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15,000 pesetas. This might well be the canvas with this title that was
bought by Sharpe at the sale of the Louis-Philippe collection in
London in 1853, documented by Baticle and Marinas (La Galerie
espagnole de Louis-Philippe au Louvre, [Paris 1981]). The likelihood
is that the picture would still have been in London fifty years later. It
is most improbable that Riquer would have acquired it in 1894 and
held on to it for nine years, however enthusiastic a collector (or
shrewd a dealer) he might have been. The hypothesis is, then, that
Riquer visited London just prior to the attested sale of 1903. Our
curiosity on this score is fired by the fact that the bulk of Riquer's
correspondence has still to be unearthed. Until such time there will
remain this and other intriguing gaps in his biography.
f) We can be virtually certain that Riquer did not return to England
after 1906. There was one occasion which might have brought him
back but evidently did not. He was officially the commissioner (with
J.M. Witty, the British vice-counsul, and George R. Smither) for the
British section of the VI (1911) International Art Exhibition in
Barcelona, but he did not participate in the selection and preparation
of this event, according to the exhibition documents still held in the
archives of the Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona.
2. Publications by Alexandre de Riquer on the subject of British and
American Art
a) 'Cartells y cartellistas', La Renaixensa, No. 7802, 13/5/1899
The Catalan daily La Renaixensa printed the text of a lecture given
by Riquer to the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc on Tuesday, May 9,
1899. The occasion of the lecture was itself, in fact, a pretext to
organise a poster exhibition on the premises of the Circle at a time
when poster art was expanding as a vogue. In his talk Riquer dealt
with this new art form the world over, with detailed attention being
paid to activity in Britain and the USA. After alluding to Fred
Walker's The White Lady of 1877, the first modern English poster,
Riquer acquainted his audience with the work of Dudley Hardy,
Steer, Greiffenhagen and Aubrey Beardsley. Reference was also
made to Robert Aiming Bell, Mabel Dearmer, Raven Hill, Leon
V. Solon, H. Ellis Morrow, Foulkes, Mackintosh, J. Hassal, the
panorama being rounded off with the Beggarstaff brothers (William
Nicholson and James Pride) whose originality Riquer underlined. He
also expressed his particular admiration of the North American
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poster, wherein he felt that the figures and their background, the
lettering and the decoration were all combined and unified with
subtle artistry. After mentions of Edward Penfield and Wartos
Edwards, Riquer stressed the originality of Louis J. Read and of
William Bradley who, with Ethel Reed, were considered the leading
exponents of poster design in the USA. The important point in
Riquer's conclusion concerns the relevance of contemporary poster
art to the democratisation and the exuberance of modern art, no
longer confined to its sanctuaries—museums, churches and private
houses—but now present in the street and in public places of all
kinds.
b) 'Aubrey Beardsley', Joventut, I, No. 1, 15/2/1900
First, it is worth remarking on the significant coincidence that this
article on Aubrey Beardsley appears in the inaugural number of
Joventut, echoing the way that the first article on Beardsley in
Britain, under the signature of Joseph Pennell, appeared in the initial
number of The Studio in 1893. Riquer was well acquainted with
Pennell's piece and we can conclude that the significant coincidence
was deliberate. The former was artistic director of Joventut, the most
important organ of late Modernisme, for which he had designed the
banner title (see p. 16 above), and his ambition was to make it the
Catalan equivalent of The Studio. Despite the relatively late date
(Beardsley had died in 1898), this was the first article on the doyen of
British decadent art to be published in Spain. Riquer's text is
illustrated with five vignettes representative of his subject's bold
linear style. The article itself opens with a brief biographical note and
then passes on to discuss Beardsley's first masterpiece, the illustration
of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, a book which the Catalan had in his
collection. Emphasising the perfume of the dream music and the
penetrating sweet sadness that the images here evoke, Riquer moves
on to the polemical illustration of Wilde's Salome, Beardsley's work
in the thirteen volumes of The Yellow Book and his last major work
in the contributions to The Savoy. He also pays attention to
Beardsley's activity in poster art, underlining the personal and highly
original character of his creations, and the failure of his many
imitators. Like so many of his contemporaries, Riquer was struck by
the strangeness of Beardsley's talent. He looks upon him as a refined
spirit and perverse intellect, the most representative image-maker of
the nineteenth century on account of his pathological delicacy, the
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incisive and unsettling edge which endows his work with such an
ambivalent fascination.
c) 'L'Album—Catalech dels enrajolats hidraulichs de la casa Escofet,
Tejera y Cia', Joventut, I, No. 13, 10/5/1900
This article, dealing with new processes of tile-production, is
significant for containing a forceful defence of the equality of the
Decorative Arts with Fine Arts. Behind this one detects the influence
of trends from England, in particular the ideas of William Morris and
the Arts and Crafts movement. Referring to the products of the
company mentioned in his title, Riquer affirms that industrial art
must be taken as seriously as painting or sculpture, that in a country
as enviably modern as England talented artists like Morris or Walter
Crane do not consider it beneath them to undertake projects in
tilework, furniture, book or wallpaper design. On the contrary, their
intervention ennobles what might otherwise be considered vulgar
products. On the other hand, though, Riquer criticises Catalan
industrialists who buy low-cost designs from abroad, arguing that
every community has an individual character, a particular collective
being that its own decorative art should reflect. Catalan-ness can
only be expressed through a distinctive national genius in creation.
The important point is that England is proposed as an example—of
nationhood and its corresponding artistic autonomy—but not as a
model to be followed slavishly. One of the essentials of the
modernista ideology and programme is thus forcefully articulated,
from a prominent platform, by Riquer.
d) 'Ex-libris', La Lectura, No. 24, 1902, pp. 476-496
This article seems to have been largely inspired by the special
Christmas number of The Studio of 1898-99, entitled Modern
Bookplates and their Designers, a copy of which Riquer possessed. In
his world-wide panorama of book-plate design (covering England,
Austria, Germany, USA, Belgium, France and Spain) the author
highlights England as the main centre of the revival of this 'refined'
art form. He writes of 'the wise doctrines which were inculcated in
the British artists by powerful genius of Ruskin, through his rigorous
critical writings, and by Dante Gabriel Rossetti through his works'.
There follows a rapid inventory of seventeen leading designers in the
field, including Walter Crane, Charles Robinson, J.V. Simpson and
Beardsley, concluded with discussion of his favourite artist, Robert
Aiming Bell. The text is accompanied by reproductions of items by
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Byam Shaw, Bell and J.V. Simpson, undoubtedly selected from his
own collection which was one of the most important in Spain.
On the subject of North-American book-plates, Riquer points out
that production has only recently begun but that its development has
been rapid. Seven artists are cited (J. Chambers, Isaac Morton, E.A. Alls,
L.J. Read, Walter J. Enright, W.W. Denslow and H.E. Goodhue)
with plates by Denslow and Enright reproduced. (Several-of the
names from this and the preceding paragraph will recur in the
section below dealing with Riquer's correspondence with designers.)
Riquer's conclusion is that the recent American production can
stand comparison with best British work.
The importance of this article is two-fold: it is the first discussion
published anywhere in Spain on modern book-plate design, and it
marks the start of a flourishing phase of creativity in the genre,
centred in Catalonia where it is an integral component of modernista
artistic innovation in the opening decade of the twentieth century.
e) Robert Anning Bell, 1910
It was a more substantial item than
an article—a 28-page quarto booklet,
in Castilian—that Riquer published
on the work of Bell, a measure of his
special admiration for this artist and
his work. The edition was produced
for him by the best Catalan printer of
the time, Oliva of Vilanova i La
Geltrú, and Riquer managed to bring
together for it 32 illustrations. In an
undated letter to Riquer from Charles
Holme, the director of The Studio,
the latter explains his inability to
locate a lithograph by Bell which the
former was convinced had appeared
in that journal. It is an indication of
the effort invested by the author in this publication, even though the
print in question was evidently not discovered.
We might wonder why Bell was Riquer's favour British artist.
Riquer himself here supplies the answer:
We can recall our surprise... on seeing accomplished something
about which we had privately dreamed and which we could not
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quite define; a great correctness of manner, reminiscent of the
masters of the Italian Renaissance, revealed through Japanese-style
shading, so starkly simple that it can be called classical.
In other words, it was the two-dimensional stylised compositions
favoured by Bell that so appealed to Riquer's sensibility. The English
artist was, moreover, one of the principal exponents of the Arts and
Crafts Movement, specialising in book-illustration and in the design
of book-plates, for which Riquer frequently expressed admiration.
Here, though, Riquer covers and analyses the diverse range of
Bell's talents: his oil paintings, watercolours, lithography, stained
glass and polychrome bas-reliefs in stucco. We have here too an
authoritative account of the English artist's life and work, founded
on information in a letter from Miss Hamel Lister, a disciple of the
master from Liverpool University's Art School, the text of which
Riquer reproduced in translation. The parallel he traces between
Beardsley and Bell is interesting, and it supplies a good definition of
his subject's art:
The type of neurosis which characterises Aubrey Beardsley does
not overwhelm Bell; the latter sees things simply and in a clear
light, being less attracted by the representation of modern life; the
former surprises and disconcerts, the latter enchants and seduces.
3. The English Section of the V Exhibition of Beaux Arts and
Industrial Arts, Barcelona 1907
a) The preparatory journey of A. de Riquer and J.M. Tamburini
Riquer's letters to the leading critic Raimon Casellas, a member of
the Exhibition's executive committee, and to Carlos Pirozzini, the
secretary-general to the organisers (as well as Tamburini's to
Casellas of 20/12/1906) bear witness to the two Catalans' formal
contacts with the English art world. As mentioned, Riquer, nominated
official commissioner of the exhibition's English section, together
with the idealist painter Tamburini, who was on the executive
committee, stayed in Britain from the end of November 1906 until
December 21 of that year, being together charged with selecting and
inviting the participation of English artists. Thanks to R.A. Bell,
Alice Woodward and the influential art-critic Konody, the Catalan
pair were able to meet some well-known artists. Among the large
number who promised to send their work were Bell himself, William
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Lee Hankey, Byam Shaw, Arthur
Rackham and his wife, Alfred
East, James Nicholson, Joseph
Pennell, Alexander Fisher, Leon
V. Solon, Walter Crane, Charles
Shannon, David Y. Cameron
and George Clausen, and the
sculptor George Frampton. Frank
Brangwyn was offered a special
room to house his decorated
mural panels to be done for the
occasion. Konody himself
promised to take charge of a
retrospective section containing
works of Watts, Burne-Jones,
Millais and Whistler. In the
event, he promised more than
he could deliver, and in the
catalogue there appeared only
Burne-Jones's portrait in oils of Miss D. Menpes and a red-pencil
study of a head by the same artist. According to documents in the
exhibition archives (now in the Museum of Modern Art of Barcelona),
Konody was also to have attended to give a lecture during the
exhibition. It did not take place (Konody apparently having taken
fright at the prospect of having to speak in public in either French or
Spanish!), despite the fact that the latter had expressed to Riquer his
desire to make contacts in the Spanish art world. Writing to his
friend, the critic Miquel Utrillo, then the editor of the journal Forma,
Riquer mentions this and Konody's interest in establishing an
exchange with The Connoisseur which he edited. In another letter (to
Pirozzini, 9/12/1906) we discover the interesting detail that Riquer
and Tamburini were keen to mobilise the American artists resident in
England and to organise an American section in the exhibition. That
this did not materialise can be attributed to political reasons:
memories and complications surviving from the recent (1898)
Spanish-USA confrontation over Cuba.
As for the second aspect of the exhibition, industrial art, Riquer
and Tamburini had contacted Alexander Fisher and Leon V. Solon,
William Morris's Kelmscott Press and Ricketts's Vale Press, as well
as several leading book-binders. While Tamburini went to Manchester
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to obtain a work by Holman Hunt, Riquer went up to Leck on the
Scottish borders to see the weaving studio directed by Leon V. Solon
where fabrics were produced to designs by William Morris.
That the executive committee was most satisfied by their two
agents' work in England is shown in the minutes of their meeting of
March 4, 1907. At an earlier meeting, on January 26, the same
committee had approved expenses, for the journey and for shipments,
totalling 4,000 pesetas.
b) The English Section
The names of the artists mentioned in letters from Riquer and
Tamburini do not quite match with those who actually figured in the
exhibition. Crane, Shannon, Cameron and Clausen did not send any
work. On the other hand one finds in the catalogue a great number of
minor figures who were doubtless contacted later by Victoriano
Codina Länglin, an Anglo-Catalan artist who lived in London and
who was a delegate of the English section, along with the Spanish
Consul in London, Joaquín M. Torroja, and the Vice-Consul, Eduard
Toda, both Catalans. The latter took charge of all the administrative
arrangements, giving Riquer and Tamburini every assistance during
their stay in London. It was due no doubt to this high degree of
coordination that so many of the artists contacted by Riquer and
Tamburini and mentioned in the correspondence actually participated
in the exhibition. The event clearly awoke interest in English artistic
circles, as is evidenced, for example, by the fact that the outstanding
sculptor Francis Derwent Wood on his own initiative accompanied
George Frampton to Barcelona. In the end the Leck fabrics did not
arrive and Ricketts's Vale Press display was replaced by samples from
the presses of J. Gulhrie, W. Heinemann and the Eragny Press of
Lucien Pissarro.
Brangwyn did not himself decorate the room assigned to him, but
Riquer used the artist's specially commissioned plans to paint the
decorative panels which, unfortunately, were not retained after the
exhibition. The decoration of the main room housing the English
section was also assigned to Riquer. Miquel Utrillo, writing in
Forma, summarised the positive results of Riquer's commitment to
the total enterprise:
The English artists have been lucky to find in Mr. Riquer the most
careful collaborator for supervising the hanging of their work, and
the selection that he himself made in London gives the Barcelona
visitors an excellent idea of British Fine Arts.
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The awards and commendations for the artists themselves were
numerous, as was usual in this type of exhibition. It must be said that
the quality of work exhibited in the foreign sections was remarkably
high, when compared with the standard of previous exhibitions in
Barcelona. The French Impressionists showed here for the first time
in Spain, while Rodin and Puvis de Chavannes were also making
importants 'firsts'. This is the context in which to judge the
exceptional diploma awarded to Brangwyn, and all the other
commendations: first-class medals to Gerald Moira, George Sauter,
Alfred East, Lee Hankey, John Lavedy, Byam Shaw, Joseph Pennell,
James Guthrie and E.H. Sullivan; second-class medals to Thomas
Austen Brown, Alfred Withers, A.K. Brown, Horace Mann Livens,
R.A. Bell, Francis Derwent Wood, and Alexander Fisher; third-class
to Sidney Lee and George Houston.
c) The sales of English works
As in the Paris salons, the majority of works on show at the Barcelona
International Exhibitions were on sale. Riquer's personal copy of the
1907 exhibition catalogue, discovered some years ago by E. Trenc in
the library of the Borràs de Riquer family in Palma de Mallorca,
clearly indicates that he had been given responsibility by the English
artists for the sale of their work. In this document, at the side of the
titles of the works exhibited, there is a note of the names of the
buyers and of the prices paid. These details correspond closely with
the content of another document, recently unearthed in the
exhibition archives, which is a formal record of the works sold, the
purchasers and the prices. Both institutional and private buyers are
included together in this list since the transactions were effected
through a global payment administered in London by Eduard Toda.
If we add to this list those works which were presented by the artists
as gifts to the Barcelona Museum, we see the complete inventory of
the English works which remained in Catalonia after the exhibition
of 1907. Full details are reproduced below, for their documentary
and anecdotal interest, with titles given in Spanish as they appeared
on display.
i) Works acquired by the Provincial Council, the City Council and
the Barcelona Museum of Art and Archaeology, currently housed in
the Museum of Modern Art
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Alexandre de Riquer
Documents
121
122
Alexandre de Riquer
The relatively high ratio of sales to exhibits —over 25% of the
works on show in this section— together with the similar proportion
of commendations, is corroboration of the conclusion expressed in
The Studio (vol. 43,1908) that 'this event was a great success for the
British contributors'. This success, as we have seen, was due in large
measure to the efforts of Alexandre de Riquer. He himself, in the
little book on R.A. Bell, relates how the single oil-painting exhibited
by this artist was acquired for the Barcelona museum by a local
group of artists and art-lovers. It seems quite evident that Riquer was
the instigator of the move, symbolising a bond of artistic friendship.
Likewise, the friendship between the Catalan artist and Leon
V. Solon was consolidated in the same circumstance. Surviving
correspondence (conserved in the archives, in Castilian translation
no doubt because of insurance matters alluded to therein) expresses
Solon's appreciation of Riquer's 'friendship and consideration'
related to the satisfaction at having achieved his first 'triumph' in
Barcelona. As well as offering one of his exhibits as a personal gift to
his Catalan friend, there is reference in the first of two letters to an
exchange of book-plates, the medium which was almost by definition
a form of international artistic communication.
4. Correspondence with book-plate designers
From his correspondence we see that Riquer wrote in French to his
British contacts. It is to be supposed that this language, which he
spoke fluently, would have also been the medium of his conversation
with contacts in England. He did have, nevertheless, a good reading
knowledge of English, as is proved by the contents of his library and
by his close familiarity with the work of a writer like Dante Gabriel
Rossetti.
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Many of Riquer's papers were disposed of years ago by the Borràs
de Riquer family, and the surviving items concerned with his
activities as book-plate designer and collector are assumed to be only
a fraction of much more compendious correspondence. They
comprise thirteen letters from England (signed by Edwin A. Abbey,
John D. Batten, R.A. Bell, James Guthrie, A.E. Harrison, Hamel
Lister, W.H. Margetson, Harold H. Nelson, J. Vinycomb, Walter
West, John Williams and Alice B. Woodward) and five from the USA
(from W.W. Denslow, William E.
Fisher, E.D. French, Maxfield
Parrish and Wilbur M. Stone).
The letters themselves are basically
formal and their content is of no
great historical importance. Moreover, they serve to guard us against
exaggerating or mythifying Riquer's
privileged relations with major
creative artists in Britain. The fact
that R.A. Bell in 1902 responds
'with great pleasure', while in
1903 he sends back Riquer's offering
and declares that he is not a
collector, is quite revealing. It
shows how important was Riquer's
journey of 1906 in creating a real
rapport and firm connections in.
England.
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Alexandre de Riquer
The only other prominent signature in the batch is that of
Maxfield Parrish, and his remarks about his 'disastrous attempts'
and 'proofs of things that have not much resemblance to book-plates'
reveal a delightfully wry humour. Two general points do arise,
however, from this small corpus of documents. The first is that
Riquer, as book-plate designer, was very much appreciated and
admired by his peers, Margetson 'envied the possession' of the King
Alfonso plate which he had been shown by Bell. H.H. Nelson
declares himself 'charmed' by Riquer's offering, and, interestingly,
praises the 'sympathetic interpretation' given by 'an excellent printer
who appears to be able to do justice to very delicate line-work'. The
second point is that the initial contact made through these formal
exchanges prepared the ground and facilitated the warm reception
Riquer received in London, in 1906, particularly from R.A. Bell and
Alice Woodward.
5. The reception of Riquer's work in Britain and the USA
We cannot claim that Riquer made a striking name for himself in the
British art world. Only the painters Zuloaga and, slightly later, Josep
Maria Sert constituted exceptions to the general disregard shown in
Great Britain towards Spanish art in the early years of this century.
(It would be a different story when Picasso and then Dalí, Miró and
their successors made their appearance.) However, in spite of this, it
remains true that through his posters and book-plates Alexandre de
Riquer enjoyed a projection abroad greater than that of any of his
Catalan or Spanish contemporaries
Coinciding with the dates of his contacts with book-plate designers
referred to above, there are a handful of articles in specialist British
journals devoted to Spanish activity in this sphere, where we find
Riquer's name mentioned and given prominence. Two plates of his
were reproduced in number 4 of The Book of Book-Plates, published
in Edinburgh in August 1902. He is cited in an article by Marc Jesus
Bertran, 'Ex-libris in Spain', printed in Vol. III number 28 of The
Picture Postcard and Collectors Chronicle (London, 1902). Curiously,
a piece with the same title was published in the same month
(October) of that year in The St. James's Gazette (Vol. XLV, number
6926). The April 1903 number (Vol. III, number 3) of the Edinburgh
review The Book of Book-Plates contained a brief notice on Riquer
and Josep Triadó.
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125
Interest in Riquer's poster work is recorded from slightly earlier. A
four-page article ('A mural decorative artist in Catalonia') appeared
in the specialist journal The Poster, signed by the French expert
Maurice Demeur who was well acquainted with his subject's work in
the genre. Here Riquer is considered as the leading poster designer in
Spain and praised for his pure, delicate line-work within the beautiful
simplicity of his compositions. Another specialist periodical, The
Poster Collector's Circular, of February 1899 published a piece on
'New Poster, Spanish Poster', which was reproduced in the following
month in The Poster. The author, C. Street, undertakes here to
introduce to his English public the work of a group of poster
designers who would have been more appropriately called the
'Catalan school', comprising principally Miquel and Antoni Utrillo,
Ramon Casas, J. Torres-Garcia, Adrià Gual etc.. Riquer figures
prominently in this company, and it is revealed that the latter's work
fetches the best prices on the London market (seven shillings per
copy), second only to Ramon Casas's outstanding Anís del Mono at
ten shillings.
The July 1903 number of The Poster and Post Card Collector
carried an announcement of the opening of a poster exhibition at the
Whitechapel Art Gallery. Riquer is listed among the participators,
along with Casas, Utrillo and Rusiñol. The Victoria and Albert
Museum possesses several posters by our artist: two items which
were reproduced in the popular collection Les Maîtres de I'Affiche
(plate 64, Tercera Exposition de Bellas Artés e Industrias Artísticas de
Barcelona de 1896, and plate 95, the advertisement for the firm of
Napoleon Fotógrafos) and two original posters, being that for the
1896 exhibition and the impressive one done to advertise the journal
Joventut donated by Mrs. Bertram Evans. In view of this it is curious
that the print department of the V & A does not hold any examples of
Riquer's book-plates or prints. The British Museum's print department,
on the other hand, reportedly holds 76 of his book-plates (with no
other Catalan artist represented in this section). These are items
which were given to the Museum between 1907 and 1924 by the
collectors Rosenheim, Campbell Dogson and Haldane Macfall, with
the largest donation (71 pieces in all) coming, rather strangely, from
a commercial enterprise, Broomhead, Cutts and Co. The donation
was made in October 1920, the year of the artist's death, and we can
only speculate as to the origins of the collection and the spirit of the
bequest.
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Alexandre de Riquer
There is less mystery concerning the background to the most
consequential article to appear in English on Alexandre de Riquer,
published in Volume XIX of The Studio (April 1900). The author,
Fernando de Arteaga y Pereira belonged to a cultivated Barcelona
family. His brother, José Maria, was a writer and composer.
Fernando himself was man of letters. He had collaborated with Felip
Pedrell and Francesc Viada in compiling the essays and sketches in
Celebridades musicales, published by Seguí in Barcelona, 1886; with
D.E. de Vaudrey he had translated Bret Harte's Californian Sketches
(Bocetos californianos) into Castilian, published by Domènech in
1883, and he was the author of a collection of not very brilliant
maxims, Quinientos cantares that came out in Barcelona in 1897. He
emigrated to England and in 1894 was appointed Lecturer in Spanish
(later, 1921-1928, titular Professor) at the Taylorian Institution in the
University of Oxford, where he taught until 1928, the year in which
he was succeeded by Salvador de Madariaga. Alexandre de Riquer
had known the Arteaga family for a long time, certainly since about
1880, possibly through their common friendship with Apel·les
Mestres.
This familiarity with and direct access to his subject show through
in F. de Arteaga's thorough, well-illustrated account of the diverse
talents and the artistic personality of Riquer. He understood, for
example, how his subject had become a 'stalwart Pre-Raphaelite', by
an independent route, resulting from the 1879 journey to Italy, even
before he was aware of the existence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Arteaga was likewise sensitive to how Japanese art had decisively
influenced the formation of Riquer's personal style. He wrote with
understanding of the latter's local milieu and of the international
perspective, and, while praising in conclusion 'the sincerity of his
convictions and the faithfulness with which he has pursued his own
ideals', could appreciate this as 'the secret alike of his strength and of
his limitations'.
The only other authority to pay, in print, serious critical attention
to Riquer's work was A.G. Temple, director of the Guildhall Gallery,
in his fine Modern Spanish Painters (1908). He devotes two pages to
the Catalan artist, whose spirit he identified as being close to the
otherworldliness of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He also suggests a
parallel between Riquer and the Belgian artist Fernand Knopff, that
'prince of mystics'. It is interesting to note, then, that Temple's scope
Documents
127
is wide and objective enough to include Riquer within the general
current of European Symbolism.
Several commentators, following Ràfols (Diccionario biogràfico de
artistas de Cataluña, Barcelona 1953), persist in assigning to Riquer
the distinction of a first-class medal in a London Book Art exhibition,
held around 1900, for the binding of his work Crisantemes. Firm
evidence is still required to corroborate this. An even more fanciful
notion in need of dismantling is the affirmation by Riquer's son,
Josep Maria de Riquer ('Quan el meu pare ja no era noi', in the 1977
commemorative volume) that his father, on his 'second' visit to
London in 1894, met both Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. It is,
indeed, intriguing to speculate what might have passed between
them if their paths had crossed, but this is the stuff of illuminated
fantasy, and not of history.
As one might expect, Riquer's name produced even fewer ripples
in the New World. He did participate, however, in the World's
Columbian Exhibition held in Chicago in 1892, the fourth centenary
of the 'discovery'. He exhibited there one of his major canvasses, The
Divine Shepherdess (1891) which was one of the first explicitly
idealistic works done by a Catalan painter. The painting was
reproduced in the Beaux-arts section of the exhibition catalogue. He
also exhibited some pieces of furniture, which won him the only gold
medal to be taken by a participator from Spain. After this, in the
early years of the twentieth century, Riquer's reputation surfaced
again briefly, in the exchanges with designers and collectors of bookplates, to which reference is made above.
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Alexandre de Riquer
is not unlikely. Certainly Riquer's experience and status as a
knowledgeable collector would have made him an obvious target for
long-range contacts in the world of international art trading.
Returning our attention to Britain, we observe that Riquer had no
individual exhibition there. He did figure once, however, in a
collective show, the VIII Exhibition of the International Society of
Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, held at the New Gallery in Regent
Street, in January-February, 1908. This occasion was organised as a
kind of grateful reciprocation on the part of the British artists,
particularly the painters, who were so pleased at their success in the
1907 Barcelona exhibition. They operated through the agency of the
International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, which was
presided over by Rodin and whose only members from Spain were
the eminent painters Zuloaga and Anglada Camarasa. Alfred
Withers, a member of the Society, who had won a medal in
Barcelona, was the moving spirit of the enterprise, as is documented
in letters from him to Riquer dated June and July 1907. Withers
himself selected a list of works for display, which was submitted to
Lavery, Vice-President of the Society, and which was then approved,
'with a few exceptions', by the governing council. Riquer exhibited
two drawings, decorative studies of heads entitled Cheveux d'or and
Vision. The exhibition catalogue, which has recently come to light,
reveals that the other participators from Spain were Aureliano de
Beruete, Agapito Casas, Ramon Casas, Joaquim Mir, Darío de
Regoyos, Tamburini and Pablo Uranga. Riquer's part in this
reverberation of the Barcelona exhibition, and in the appearance of
an albeit tenuous Barcelona-London axis, is certainly worthy of
note.
It remains true, however, that in his day Alexandre de Riquer was
known in Britain only by a small sector of the artistic community
and by colleagues in the world of book-plate and poster collecting. In
this sense we can say that his international projection was symbolic
(and symptomatic of developments in Catalonia) rather than widely
effective. It goes without saying that today his name is even less
known, even among specialist historians of modern art. It is
distressing to report that his book on Robert Aiming Bell does not
appear in the catalogue of any important London library. Our hope is
that the present monograph will serve to redress this neglect. The
'British connection' of Alexandre de Riquer is an aspect of a major
chapter of Catalan culture. The two-way nature of this connection
Documents
129
means that objective study of it focuses a side-light on the British
dimension that complements the spot-light upon Riquer's key role in
Catalan Modernisme.
6. English and American books, etc. in the library of Alexandre de
Riquer
The list which we reproduce below is probably not the complete
inventory of the English and Amercian section of Riquer's library.
However, as the majority of the volumes listed here, now held in the
Barcelona Museums Library, were bought in a single lot, at the
artist's death, by the well-informed art historian Joaquim Folch i
Torres, we can safely suppose that few works of importance would
have escaped him. Even so, a handful of'stray' items were located in
the library of Riquer's daughter, Emilia, in Palma de Mallorca.
A glance at the list is sufficient to make one realise that this
collection of art literature, still impressive in its volume and range,
must have been quite unique in its day in Catalonia and, needless to
say, in the whole of Spain. Its richness can be seen to represent
compensation for the short and relatively infrequent visits of Riquer
to England. His reading, or at least the material that be had at hand
for reference, supplies an insight into the depth of knowledge and
appreciation that Riquer acquired about a specific, and fertile, zone
of the international scene. Journals and magazines would, of course,
have played a major role in keeping him abreast of news and the
latest developments. The separate list betokens a real avidity for
information and for novelty, of which the complete run of The
Studio, from 1893 to 1910, is fully representative.
Also listed separately is the sizeable section of works devoted to
book-plates, the scope and quantity of which naturally reflect
Riquer's specialism in this area, particularly insofar as it was his
principal active link with the Anglo-Saxon art world. More surprising
is the paucity of the other separate list, of works dealing with poster
art. We must surmise that some specialised items from this section
have been lost, for it is unthinkable that he would not have held
copies of The Poster, for example, at least of the number which
carried an article on his work. Other strange 'lacunae' are The Poster
Collector's Circular and The Poster and Post Card Collector, both of
which, as mentioned above, published pieces on the state of the art in
Spain.
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Alexandre de Riquer
The thematic profile of the main corpus of the collection reflects
Riquer's main areas of interest. His favoured Pre-Raphaelites—
Dante G. Rossetti, John Millais, Burne-Jones and William Morrishave a large presence among the works on modern art, but Turner,
Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley and Frederic Leighton also figure
prominently (showing, incidentally, how much higher then than now
was the standing of the latter). In line with the admiration that they
all shared for the Italian primitives, it is not surprising to find the
strong representation here of works on Luca Signorelli, Filippino
Lippi, Fra Angelico, Carlo Crivelli, Donatello, Pietro delia Francesca,
published in London between 1898 and 1902. One can imagine the
enthusiasm with which these acquisitions must have been made
during the 1906 visit.
Riquer's friendship with the versatile Leon V. Solon and his
collector's taste for objets d'art explain the various titles on pottery,
furniture and jewellery. The Arts and Crafts phenomenon was, of
course, deeply engaging to Riquer, whence the abundance of items
on the decorative and the graphic arts among his books. One notes
the presence of Walter Crane's fine illustrated editions. It is,
moreover, book illustration which is the connecting thread running
through the literary content of the collection. As a bibliophile Riquer
was evidently as interested in the container as in the contents, with
the possible exception of the Pre-Raphaelite verse which he accumulated.
This would explain his possession of different editions of the same
work: Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle (1897 and 1905), for
example, or the Dent and Heinemann printings of Shakespeare's A
Midsummer Night's Dream. What his copies of A Midsummer Night's
Dream (1895) and The Tempest (1901), Keat's Poems (1897), English
Lyrics from Spencer to Milton (1898), Jameson's Shakespeare's
Heroines (1901), Lycidas and other Odes by Milton (1903) and
Palgrave's Golden Treasury (1907) all have in common is that they
were illustrated by Robert Arming Bell.
Most of the major British illustrators from the turn of the century
are present in Riquer's collection: William Nicholson, Maurice
Greiffenhagen, Kate Greenaway, Arthur Rackham, et al. J.M.
Barrie's Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, with the plates which are
Rackham's masterpiece, comes with a dedication to Alexandre de
Riquer 'With kind remembrances from Mr and Mrs Arthur
Rackham'. Aubrey Beardsley occupies pride of place, though, with
virtually all his major book illustrations: Malory's Le morte d'Arthur,
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Wilde's Salome, Pope's The Rape of the Lock, in addition to the work
in The Yellow Book and The Savoy. In this connection it is
interesting to note that, side by side with the major journals
mentioned and other titles like The Studio and The Graphic, we find
much lesser-known publications such as The Green Sheaf, The
Dome, The Elf, and The Quest, the latter emanating from the
Birmingham art school where William Morris's archaic artesan style
remained pervasive.
All the tendencies of contemporary English illustration are present
in this part of Riquer's library, from the neo-gothic archaism of The
Quest through to the stark simplicity and boldness of line of William
Nicholson and E. Gordon Craig. The panoply embraces the
Japonisme and the decadent exquisiteness of Beardsley, Rackham's
charming whimsies and Kate Greenaway's eighteenth-century
nostàlgics. Nonetheless all these journals evince a distinctly fin-desiècle character and a spirit which sets them apart from their
predecessors: the transformation of the volume itself into an objet
d'art with the conscientiously decorative quality of the illustration
expressed in the incorporation of vignettes, culs de lampes, ornate
capital letters, all fusing typography and image into a unified, unique
whole. For Riquer it was this which constituted the great lesson of
English book art, whose conceptions, as we have seen, he implanted
almost single-handedly into Catalonia.
We remark that Riquer's library contains relatively few American
works, with the items on book-plates being conspicuous: the
collection of booklets devoted to individual designers published by
Goodspeed of Boston, the classic historical accounts of the genre by
Dexter at al, and by Gade. Beyond this field the only features of note
are: William Bradley. His Book, the periodical in which William
Bradley produced his own finely lyrical illustrations, reminiscent of
Beardsley though less pathological and disturbing; the collection of
handsome covers of the Inland Printer from Chicago, and the
monthly The Quartier Latin, a self-consciously Art Nouveau
publication which was the organ of the American Art Association of
Paris. The imbalance of British and American works stands out, to
the extent that one concludes that the latter figure in Riquer's library
only insofar as they are relevant to or reflective of British hook
art.
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Alexandre de Riquer
For the rest, we consider that the lists which follow speak for
themselves, constituting a fascinating 'period piece', a rich feast for
the imagination and the profile of a sensitive, curious and cultivated
talent.
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133
i) BOOKS
Anonymous:
A Record of An in 1898. The Studio.
Beauty's Awakening, London, The Studio, 1899.
Catalogue of Planotype Reproductions of Pictures & C. Photographed and Sold by Mr,
Hollyen, No.9. Pembroke, London (Burne Jones, G.F. Watts, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, Hans Holbein, etc...).
Inland Printer Covers. Chicago. The Inland Printer Company.
Modem Book-Bindings & their Designers. London. The Studio, 1900.
Reproductions from Illuminated Manuscripts (British Museum). London, Longmans &
Co. 1907.
Spring Catalogue. The Copley Prints, Boston, Curlis & Cameron, 1899.
The An Gallery of the World's Columbian Exposition, George Barrie, Philadelphia,
1893.
The Art of 1897, London, offices of The Studio.
The Complete Cynic's Calendar of Revised Wisdom, 1906, Paul Elder and Co., San
Francisco, 1906.
The Water-Colours of J.M. W. Turner, London, The Studio, 1909.
Armour, Margaret: Songs of Love and Death, London, J.M. Dent & Co., 1896.
Baldry, A.L.: Modern British Water-Colour Drawings, London, The Studio, 1900.
Baldry, A.L.: Sir John Everett Millais. His An and Influence, London, George Bell and
Sons, 1899.
Barrie, J.M.: Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, with drawings by Arthur Rackham,
Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1906.
Harrington, Mac-Gregor: King Long Beard or Annals of the Golden Dreamland,
London, John Lane, 1898.
Bate, Percy: The English Pre-Raphaelite Painters, London, George Bell and Sons,
1901.
Bell, Malcolm: Edward Burne Jones, London, George Bell and Sons, 1893.
Benson, Father Robert Hugh: Reginald Balfour and S.C. Ritchie- An Alphabet of
Saints-, London, Burns & Cates, 1907.
Boccaccio: Tales, London, George Allen, 1899.
Bonser, A.E., Sidney Woolf, B. and Buchheim, E.S.: The Land of Enchantment,
London, Cassell and Co, 1907.
Braine, Shila, E.: To Tell the King the Sky is Falling, London, Blackie and Son, Ltd.
Browning, Robert: Poems, London, George Bell and Sons, 1897.
Carlyle, Thomas: Sartor Resartus, London, George Bell & Sons, 1900.
Cook, Edward, T: A Popular Handbook to the Tate Gallery, 'National Gallery of
British Art', London, Macmillan and Co, 1898.
Cosslet Smith, Arthur: The Turquoise and the Desert, London, John Lane, 1903.
Crane, Walter Line and Form, London, George Bell and Sons, 1902.
Crane, Walter: Of the Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New, London, George
Bell and Sons, 1896.
Crane, Walter. Queen Summer or the Tourney of the Lily and the Rose, London, Cassell
&Co.
Crane, Walter Red Riding Hood's Picture Book, London, John Lane, 1898.
Crane, Walter The Bases of Design, London, George Bell and Sons, 1898.
Cruttwell, Maud: Luca Signorelli, London, George Bell and Sons, 1899.
Craper, Warwick, H.: The Historical Paintings in the Great Hall in London of the
Worshipful Company of Skinners Aforetime of the Craft and Mystery of the Guild
of the Body of Christ, London, The Caradoc Press, 1909.
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Alexandre de Riquer
Dennis, John (introd.): English Lyrics from Spencer to Milton, London. George Bell &
Sons, 1898.
Dixon, E. (ed.): Fairy Tales of the Arabian Nights, London J.M. Dent & Co., 1893.
Doddridge Blackmore, Richard: Fringulia or Tales in Verse, Cleveland, The Burrows
Brothers Co., 1895.
Drury, C. and Fortnum, E.: South Kensington An Handbooks, London.
Dunsany, Lord: The Gods of Pregana, London, Elkin Matthews, 1905.
Evans, Sebastian (introd. and transl.): The High of the Holy Grail, London, J.M. Dent
& Co., 1903.
Field, Eugene: Poems of Childhood, London, John Lane, 1904.
Gallatin, A.E.: Aubrey Beardsley's Drawings, London, Elkin Mathews, 1903.
Goldsmith, Oliver: The Deserted Village, London & New York, Harper & Brothers,
1902.
Goldsmith, Oliver: The Deserted Village, London, Constable & Co., 1909.
Graham, Kenneth (introd.): A Hundred Fables of Aesop, London, John Lane, 1899.
Graham, Kenneth: Dream Days, London, John Lane.
Graham, Kenneth: The Golden Age, London, John Lane.
Greenaway, Kate: Kate Greenaway's Birthday Book for Children, London and New
York, Frederic Wame and Co.
Grimm, Brothers: Fairy Tales, London, Constable and Co., 1909.
Grimm, Brothers: Household Tales, London, J.M.. Dent & Co., 1901.
Hamilton, Myra: Kingdoms Curious, London, William Heinemann, 1905.
Hendry, Hamish: Red Apple and Silver Bells, London, Blackie and Son.
Holme, Charles: An in England During the Elizabethan & Stuan Periods, London,
The Studio, 1908.
Holme, Charles: Colour Photography and Other Recent Developments of the An of the
Camera, London, The Studio, 1908.
Holme, Charles: Masters of Landscape Paintings: J.S. Cotman, David Coxpeter de
Wint, London, The Studio, 1903.
Holme, Charles: Modem British Domestic Architecture and Decoration, London, The
Studio, 1901.
Holme, Charles: Modern Design in Jewellery and Fans, London, The Studio 1902.
Holme, Charles: Modern Etchings and Engravings, London, The Studio, 1902.
Holme, Charles: Modern Pen Drawings European and American, London, The Studio,
1900-1901.
Holme, Charles: Old English Country Cottages, London, The Studio, 1906.
Holme, Charles: Royal Scottish Academy, London, The Studio, 1907.
Holme, Charles: Representative Art of Our Time, London, The Studio, 1903.
Holme, Charles: Sketching Grounds, London, The Studio, 1909.
Holme, Charles: The An Revival in Austria, London, The Studio, 1906.
Holme, Charles: The Gardens of England in the Midland & Eastern Counties, London,
The Studio, 1908.
Holme, Charles: The Old Water-Colour Society, 1804-1894, London, The Studio,
1905.
Holme, Charles: The Royal Academy from Reynolds to Millais, London, The Studio,
1904.
Holme, Charles: The Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours, London, The
Studio, 1906.
Hutton, Edward (introd.): Palgrave's Golden Treasury, London, J.M. Dent & Co.,
1907.
Documents
135
Ingoldsby, Thomas: The Ingoldsby Legends or Mirth and Marvels, London, J.M. Dent
& Co., 1907.
Irving, Washington: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, from the sketch book of Washington
Irving, published for Will Bradley by R.H. Russell, New York, 1897.
Irving, Washington: Rip Van Winkle, New York, Will Bradley, 1897.
Irving, Washington: Rip Van Winkle, London, W. Heinemann, 1905.
Jameson: Shakespeare's Heroines, London, J.M. Dent & Co., 1901.
Jerrold, Walter: Bon Mots of Samuel Foote and Theodore Hook, London, J.M. Dent &
Co., 1904.
Jerrold, Walter: Bon Mots of Charles Lamb and Douglas Jerrold, London, J.M. Dent &
Co., 1904.
Jerrold, Walter: Bon Mots of Sydney Smith and R. Brinsley Sheridan, London, J.M.
Dent & Co., 1904.
Keats, John: Poems, London, George Bell and Sons, 1897.
Khayyam, Omar Rubaiyat, Edinburgh, T.N. Foulis.
Konody, P.G.: Filippino Lippi, London, George Newnes.
Langton, Douglas: Fra Angelico, London, George Bell & Sons, 1902.
Longus: Daphnis and Chloe, London, Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1893.
Lovey, Chisholm: The Enchanted Land. Tales Told Again, London, T.C. & E.G. Jack,
1906.
MacDonald, George: At The Back of the North Wind, London, Blackie and Son.
MacDonald, George: Ronald Banner man's Boyhood, London, Blackie and Son.
MacDonald, George: The Princess and the Goblin, London, Blackie and Son.
Mac Neil Rushforth, G.: Carlo Crivelli, London, George Bell and Sons, 1900.
Madox Rossetti, Helen M.: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, London, H. Virtue and Co.,
1902.
Malory, Sir Thomas: Le morte d'Arthur, London, J.M. Dent & Co., 1893.
Mantegazza, Paolo: The Legends of Flowers: or 'This Love That Makes the World
Round' (2nd series), Edinburgh, T.N. Foulis, 1909.
Marillier, H.C.: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, London, George Bell and Sons, 1899.
Martin, David: The Glasgow School of Painting, London, George Bell and Sons,
1897.
Matthews, Brander: Bookbindings Old and New, London, George Bell and Sons,
1896.
Mew, Egan: Chelsea and Chelsea Pottery. Derby China, London, T.C. & E.C. Jack.
Mew, Egan: Dresden China, London, T.C. & E.C. Jack
Mew, Egan: Japanese Porcelain, London, T.C. & E.C. Jack.
Mew, Egan: Old Bow China, London, T.C. & E.C. Jack.
Millais, John Everett: The Parables of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, London,
Routledge and Sons.
Milton, John: Lycidas and Other Odes, with illustrations by R. Arming Bell, London,
George Bell and Sons, 1903.
Morris, William: The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems, London, John Lane,
1904.
Morris, William: Sir Galahad, a Christmas Mystery, New York, Clarke Conwell,
1902.
Murray, Hilda: Echoes of Sport, London, T.N. Foulis, 1910.
Neale, Dr: Good King Wenceslas, Birmingham, Cornish Brs., 1895.
Nicholson, William: London Types, London, William Heinemann, 1898.
Nicholson, William: Modern Illustration, London, George Bell.
136
Alexandre de Riquer
Nicholson, William: The Square Book of Animals, London, William Heinemann,
1900.
Paine, Bigelow, Albert The Autobiography of a Monkey, New York, R.H. Russell,
1897.
Parry, Edward, Abbot: The First Book of Krab, London, David Nutt, 1897.
Parry, Edward, Abbot: Katawanpus, London, David Nutt, 1895.
Pennell, Joseph: San Francisco. The City Of The Golden Gate, London, T.N.
Foulis.
Pennell, Joseph: Venice. The City of the Sea, London, T.N. Foulis.
Poe, Edgar Allan: (see Williams, Noel and Wright, J.).
Pollock, Montague Ban: Light and Water, London, George Bell and Sons. 1903.
Pope, Alexander. The Rape of the Lock, London, Leonard Smithers, 1896.
Pyle, Howard: The Wonder Clock. New York, Harper & Brothers, 1904.
Raleigh, Walter. The Last Fight of The Revenge, London, Gibbings and Co. 1908.
Rea, Hope: Donatello 'Il maestro di chi sanno', London, George Bell and Sons,
1900.
Reade, Charles: The Cloister and the Hearth. Chatto & Windus, 1909.
Rhys, Ernest: Frederic Lord Leighton. A Illustrated Record Of His Life and Work.
London, George Bell and Sons, 1900.
Rinder, Frank: Etchings of D.Y. Cameron, Edinburgh, Otto Schulze and Co. 1908.
Ross, Robert et Aymer Vallance: Aubrey Beardsley, London, John Lane, 1909.
Rosetti, Dante Gabriel: Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1854-1870) to William
Allingham, London.
Ruskin, John: La couronne d'olivier sauvage. (transl. George Elwall), Paris, Société
d'éditions artístiques.
Shakespeare, William: A Midsummer Night's Dream, London, J.M. Dent & Co.,
1895.
Shakespeare, William: A Midsummer Night's Dream, London, W. Heinemann,
1908.
Shakespeare, William: The Merry Wives of Windsor, Raphael Tuck & Sons, London,
Paris, New York.
Shakespeare, William: The Tempest, London, Freemantle & Co., 1901.
Shakespeare, William: The Tempest, London, Hodder & Stoughton.
Shaw, Henry: Dresses and Decoration of The Middle Ages, London, William Dickering,
1843.
Solon, M.L.: The Ancient Art Stoneware of the Low Countries and Germany of 'gres de
Flandres' & "steinzeug", London, Chiswick Press, 1892.
Strachey, Henry: Raphael, London, George Bell and Sons, 1900.
Strang, William: A Book of Giants, Drawn, engraved and written by William Strang,
London, The Unicorn Press.
Strange, Edward, F.: Alphabets, London, George Bell and Sons, 1896.
Tennant, Pamela: The Children and the Pictures, London, William Heinemann.
Tennyson, Alfred Lord: Poems, London, George Bell and Sons, 1905.
Thorburn, Augusta: My Friend Poppity, London, David Nutt.
Townsend, Harrison: The Mansions of England in the Older Time, London, The
Studio, 1906.
Tree, Herbert Beerbohm: Souvenir of Stephen Phillips: 'Ulysses' produced at Her
Majesty's Theatre, on the 1st February, 1902, London, Carl Hentschel Ltd.
Vallance, Aymer: William Morris. His An, his Writings and his Public Life, London,
George Bell and Sons, 1898.
Documents
137
Van de Put, A.: Hispano-moresque Ware of the XV Century, London, Chapman and
Hall, Ltd., 1904.
Waters, W.G.: Pietro delia Francesca, London, George Bell and Sons, 1901.
Way, T.R. and Dennis G.R.: The An of James McNeill Whistler, London, George Bell
and Sons, 1903.
Weale, James W.H.: Ham Memling, London, George Bell and Sons, 1901.
Webb, H.D. & H.G.: Quia amore langueo, Bedford, Webb, 1902.
Wedmore, Frederick: English Water-Colour, London, The Studio, 1902.
White, Gleeson: English Illustration 'The Sixties': 1855-70, Westminster, Archibold
Constable and Co., 1897.
Wilde, Oscar Salome, London, Elkin Mathews & John Lane, 1894.
Williams, Noel H. (introd.). The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, London, George Bell and
Sons, 1901.
Williamson, George, C.: Pietro Vannucci Called Perugino, London, George Bell and
Sons, 1900.
Wilson, H.: Silverwork and Jewellery, London, John Hogg, 1903.
Wright, J.C. (introd.): Some Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Near Bognor (Sussex), J.
Guthrie, 1901.
ü) JOURNALS
The Artist, 1898 and 1899, London, Archibald Constable & Co.
Bradley. His book, May-August and November, 1896, January 1897. Massachussets
(U.S.A.), The Way Side Press.
A Broad Sheet, Years I and II (1902-1903), London, Elkin Mathews.
Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Ans, Boston.
The Dome, Nos. 1, 2, 3 (1897) and 5 (1898), Nos. 1, 3 (1898), London, The Unicorn
press.
The Elf, 1st series, Nos. 1-4 (1899-1900), 2nd series. Nos. 1-4 (1902), New series, Nos 1
and 2 (1905), London, Old Bourne Press.
The Graphic, issues of 14, 21, 28 Jan and 4 Feb. 1905, London.
The Green sheaf, No. 6 (1903) and Nos. 9-13 (1904), London, Elkin Mathews.
The Quartier Latin, 1897, Paris and Londres, Ilifte & Son.
The Quest, Nos. 2 and 3 (1895), Birmingham, Cornish Brothers.
Royal Academy Pictures, 1896, 1897,1899, 1900, London, Cassell & Co.
The Savoy, 1896, London, Leonard Smithers.
The Studio, 1893 to 1910 complete vols. and No. 231 (June 1912), London, The
Studio.
The Year's An, 1906-1908, London, Hutchinson and Co. ,
The Yellow Book, Nos. from April 1894 to April 1897, London, Elkin Mathews & John
Lane.
iii) WORKS ON BOOK-PLATES
Books
Anonymous:
Book-plates designed by Brown, Hapgood, Theodore, Boston, Charles E. Goodspeed,
1907.
Book-plates designed by Chouteau, Brown, Franck, Boston, Charles E. Goodspeed,
1905.
Eaton, Hugh and Margaret. Their Book-plates, Boston, Charles E. Goodspeed,
1907.
Edwards Edwards and his Book-plates, Boston, Charles E. Goodspeed, 1903.
138
Alexandre de Riquer
Being a second collection of twelve signed and numbered proofs of some of the plates
designed by William Edgar Fisher of Fargo, 1902.
Being a third collection of twelve signed and numbered proofs of some of the plates
designed by William Edgar Fisher of Fargo, 1903.
Book-plates from the Designs of Fletcher, Seymour, Boston, Charles E. Goodspeed,
1903.
Herbert Gregson and his Book-plates, Boston, Charles E. Goodspeed, 1903.
Adrian J. lono and his Book-plates, Boston, Charles E. Goodspeed, 1903.
F. Arthur Jacobson and his Book-plates, Boston, Charles E. Goodspeed, 1903.
Marguerite Scribner Frost and her Book-plates, Boston, Charles E. Goodspeed,
1903.
D.M.N. Stauffer. His Book-plates, Boston, Charles E. Goodspeed.
Castle, Egerton: English Book-plates Ancient and Modern, London; George Bell and
Sons, 1894.
Craig, Gordon: Book-plates Designed & Cut on Wood, London, Arthur Chilver,
1900.
Dexter, Allen, Charles et Hewins, H., N.: American Book-plates, London, George Bell
and Sons, 1895.
Fincham, Henry, W.: Artists and Engravers of British and American Book-plates,
London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1897.
Gade, John, A.: Book-plates Old and New, New York, M.S. Mansfield and Co.,
1898.
Guthrie, James: A Little Book of Book-plates, (No. 9 'The Elf), London, Old Bourne
Press, 1906.
Hamilton, Walter: French Book-plates, London, George Bell and Sons, 1896.
Harrison, Erat, T.: Twelve Ex-libris, Harrison & Sons.
Hoggarth, Graham and Oxon, A., B.: David Becket: his Book of Book-plates,
Edinburgh, Otto Schulze & Co. 1906.
Labouchere, Norma: Ladies' Book-plates, London, George Bell and Sons, 1895.
Macey Stone, Wilbur: Women Designers of Book-plates, New York, Randolph R. Beam,
1902.
Nelson, Harold: His Book of Book-plates, Edinburgh, Otto Schulze & Co., 1904.
Simpson, Joseph, W.: His Book, Edinburgh, Otto Schulze & Co.
Simpson, Joseph and Macey Stone, Wilbur. The People Book of Book-plates, NewYork, M.F. Manfield & Co., 1901.
Wamecke, Frederick: Rare Book-plates of the XV and XVI Centuries by Albert Dürer,
H. Burgmair, H.S. Beham, Virgil Solis, Jost Amman, etc... , London, H. Grevel
& Co., 1894.
White, Gleeson and Uzanne, Octave: Modem Book-plates. Their Designers. French
edition of Christmas supplement of The Studio, Paris, Lib. Ottendorf, 1898.
Journals
The Bibliophile (A magazine for the Collector, student and general reader), Years I and
U (March 1908-August 1909), London, The Bibliophile.
The Book-lover's Magazine, Books and Book-plates, Years VI-VIII (1905-1908),
Edinburgh, Otto Schulze and Co.
The Book of Book-plates, Years 1900-1905, London, Williams and Norgate.
Documents
iv) WORKS ON POSTER ART
Hiatt, Charles: Picture Posters, London, George Bell and Sons, 1895.
Penfield, Edwards: Posters in Miniature, New York, R.H. Russell, 1897.
Rogers, W.S.: A Book of the Poster, London, Greening & Co., 1901.
139

Alexandre de Riquer - The Anglo

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